Data from responses to a grammaticality judgement test by 26 learners of English as a second language at two proficiency levels were used to investigate syntactic acquisition. Four syntactic structures were examined. Results suggest that less proficient subjects use syntactic strategies, while more proficient learners use semantic-based…

Fifty-one adult Spanish speakers at three levels of ESL ability were tested in both their elicited imitation (production) and act-out (comprehension) of complex sentences that were structurally identical. Analysis of variance results indicate that production tests, not comprehension tests, principally evaluate a learner's structural knowledge.…