The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

Most of the previous studies focused on lexical and syntactic features in adapted texts while little attention has been paid to the structural complexity from the perspective of the amount of information. In this study, we intend to examine the differences in structural complexity in adapted texts from the perspective of the amount of information…

This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults' (N = 496 participants, ages 18-82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our…

Sign language learners with a spoken language background face the challenge of acquiring a second language in a different modality. In the course of this endeavor, one of the modality-specific phenomena they encounter is the use of classifier predicates, also known as depicting signs. Classifier predicates contain a meaningful hand configuration…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

This study investigated the relative ease or difficulty of grammar commonly taught in intermediate (second-year) German at the university level. Previous studies have investigated the ease or difficulty of specific grammar structures, factors that make it difficult to learn L2 grammar, and teachers' and learners' perceptions of difficult grammar.…

The study examined 37 language samples of 37 Spanish-English kindergartners and first graders from a larger sample of the Multitudes Project in California. The focus was on investigating how these young English language learners produced narratives in English, what language elements they included, and whether these elements correlated or related…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

The effectiveness of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials significantly influences the learning outcomes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, positioning these resources as cardinal in the acquisition process. Despite this widely acknowledged significance, there remains a notable gap in research concerning the evaluation of key…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This paper is based within the framework of step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation. The underlying philosophy behind this approach is that when specific aspects of legal translations are tackled in isolation and trainees become aware of the pitfalls involved and the possible solutions, this helps them in further training as well as in…

This study investigates pronoun interpretation by second language (L2) learners of English, focusing on whether first language (L1) transfer and/or processing difficulty affect L2 learners' pronoun resolution. It is hypothesized that L2 learners' non-target performance in L2-pronoun interpretation is attributable to two sources. The first is the…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…