When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Recent studies suggest that developing L2 receptive knowledge of single words is associated with increased receptive knowledge of collocations. However, no study to date has directly examined the interrelationship between productive word knowledge and productive collocation knowledge. To address this gap, the present study administered a…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect…

This paper presents an analysis and comparison of the projection of Chinese "shen" and English "deep" from the spatial domain to other domains of time, sense, emotion, behavior, and society from a cognitive perspective by using the comparative and contrastive method, explaining the universality and differences of SHEN and DEEP…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

This study asks whether children accept both interpretations of ambiguous sentences with contexts supporting each option. Twenty-six 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children and a control group of 30 English-speaking adults participated in a truth value judgment task. As a step towards evaluating the complexity of syntactic ambiguity, the…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…