This study quantifies second language (L2) knowledge of aural single words and aural phrasal verbs (PVs) and investigates their relationship with L2 listening comprehension. An aural first language (L1) meaning recall test format was used to measure knowledge of 81 single-word and 81 PV target items (with equivalent frequencies of occurrence)…

This study explored a way to help Japanese university students write longer essays while maintaining grammatical accuracy. Participants were three groups of students enrolled in a one-year EFL course in different academic years (N = 111), and the number of words they wrote in 30 minutes and the number of errors made per 100 words were compared. To…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

This study discusses the impact of interactionist output-oriented approaches, specifically, the effects of collaborative text reconstruction on subjunctive recognition and production in the written modality by English-dominant Spanish second-language learners. It also examines whether students' text length and text complexity increase after…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a new instructional toolkit for improving English grammar skills, particularly verb tense structures, among Thai EFL students. The research objectives were (1) to evaluate the toolkit's effectiveness in enhancing students' English grammar skills in verb tense structures; (2) to examine the…

This study investigated the acquisition of English "control" and "raising" ("over Experiencer") constructions with three groups of Thai EFL learners (lower intermediate, intermediate, and advanced). Thai and English, with respect to "control," commonly have PRO and infinitive markers, but Thai does not…

To investigate L2 adolescent learners' use of machine translation (MT), an MT error correction (EC) test was developed, based on the analysis of MT errors arising from translating the learners' L1 of middle school EFL textbooks. Learners were also asked to report on their use of MT EC strategies on the EC task. Results indicated that…

This work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether "a/para"-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine…

This paper investigated how production task combined with teacher feedback (in the form of recasts) affects child second language development, and the effects of task complexity on their production performance. 92 child learners of English in three intact classes were assigned to three tasks of different complexity (simple, +complex, ++complex).…

Morphological knowledge has been identified as a significant sub-skill in bilingual listening comprehension, and lexical researchers consider listening comprehension an essential means for language learning. The current research attempted to examine the crucial four derivative word classes (adverb, adjective, verb, and noun) to represent knowledge…