The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed…

This dissertation explores why grammatical structures are better learned implicitly or explicitly by investigating differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. To address the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit instruction in the classroom, the researcher focused on two of the main features that constrain DOM in Spanish: animacy and…

Different morphological theories assign different status to parts of words, roots and affixes. Models range from accepting both bound roots and affixes to only assigning unit status to standalone words. Some questions that interest researchers are (1) What are the smallest morphological units, words or word parts? (2) How does frequency affect…