The availability of a first language translation equivalent (i.e., congruency) has repeatedly been shown to influence second-language collocation processing in decontextualized tasks. However, no study to date has examined how L2 speakers process congruent/incongruent collocations on-line in a real-world context. The present study aimed to fill…

Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

Standard Spanish grammar states that desideratives ("querer que"), directives ("aconsejar que"), purpose clauses ("para que"), causatives ("hacer que"), emotive-factives ("alegrarse de que"), negated epistemics ("no creer que"), dubitatives ("dudar que"), and modals ("ser…

The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]". The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment…

Recent studies suggest that developing L2 receptive knowledge of single words is associated with increased receptive knowledge of collocations. However, no study to date has directly examined the interrelationship between productive word knowledge and productive collocation knowledge. To address this gap, the present study administered a…

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N +…

Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

This study investigates the hypothesis that non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings pose a greater challenge for non-native (L2) than for native (L1) speakers, focusing on a previously understudied phenomenon. We carried out an antecedent judgment task with L1 German and L1 Russian-speaking, proficient L2 learners of German to examine Condition C…

The study aims at investigating the discourse marker "hasa" 'now' in Jordanian Arabic using relevance theory. The study also examined the grammaticalization of "hasa" and how it developed to be a discourse marker. The study also explored the functions of "hasa" in Jordanian Arabic. The data, which consisted of 500…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

The present study examined the effect of language background and topic on productive formulaic competence. Guided by usage-based theory of language learning, this study used a distribution-based approach to the examination of the native-likeness of formulaic usage in English timed argumentative writing. Six indices informed by a large-scale native…

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which…