The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of repeated use of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory (MSRI) in translator self-training. Designed by the researchers, the MSRI includes the cognitive management strategies of planning, monitoring and evaluation. A pre-post comparison study was conducted with two groups of students. The…

This paper examines the strategies used by speakers of Spanish as a second language (L2) for marking Information Focus, a phenomenon found at the syntax-discourse interface. Sorace and colleagues have proposed the Interface Hypothesis, according to which the syntax-discourse interface poses unique challenges for bilinguals (Sorace, 2011). With…

This article reports on the first results of a large-scale research programme that aims to define and circumscribe the construct of phraseological complexity and to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its relevance for second language theory. Within this broad agenda, the study has two main objectives. First, it investigates to what extent…

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of…

This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty-two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

To determine whether the development of writing skills changes across college years, a study examined the writing of average-age college freshmen, sophomores, and beginning juniors. Writing samples were obtained during the first week of the first semester, last week of the first semester, first week of the third semester, and first week of the…

Investigates the effects of science students' domain-specific knowledge and language proficiency on local lexical and syntactic processing and on semantic and higher conceptual processing of biology texts written in the students' first and second languages. Results indicate that language proficiency affects lower-level processing and…