This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, November 7, Sunday, November 8, Saturday, November 14, and Sunday, November 15 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST).  Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 13:00 on Saturday, November 7.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, November 7 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, November 6, at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, November 6.

Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are conventional strings of language that are ubiquitous in language. Examples of MWEs include idioms, binomials, collocations, lexical bundles, and other phraseological units. Research has consistently shown that MWEs exhibit a processing advantage over novel phrases in both first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. This effect has generally been attributed to MWEs being highly familiar, frequent, and predictable sequences of words—characteristics that facilitate efficient language processing. While the plethora of recent studies have helped us better understand the nature of MWEs and the factors that may influence their real-time processing, several notable gaps and unresolved questions remain. In this series of seminars, we will examine and reflect on some of the key topics within the domain of the online processing of MWEs, including—but not limited to—the comprehension and production of MWEs in adult L1 and L2 speakers, the role of modification in MWE processing, and MWE processing in children. We will also consider the methodologies commonly used in MWE processing research, including reaction-time measures, eye movements, spoken corpora, and electrophysiology, while critically evaluating their respective strengths and limitations. Special attention will be paid to directions for future research and possible ways forward in advancing our understanding of phrasal processing.