Although syntactic priming has been well studied and is commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. Recent studies have suggested that exposure to nonlinguistic statistical patterns may influence language users' relative clause attachment biases, but whether the priming effect comes…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of…