Analysis of the responses of Spanish, Chinese, and German learners of English-as-a-Second-Language to English sentences with empty pronominal categories found that, although empty pronouns were pragmatically more natural in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese than in English or German, only the Spanish subjects had significantly higher mean…

To estimate reading difficulty of items on a sentence repetition task, a study had 50 adult English as a second language (ESL) students repeat each of 26 sentences immediately after two presentations. High-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than low-difficulty items, and the most difficult items involved the processing of…