While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al.…

Research on second language (L2) pronoun use in null-argument languages has traditionally focused on whether or not a speaker's first language (L1) also allows null pronouns. However, recent studies have pointed out that it is equally important to consider the specific linguistic properties of overt pronouns in the L1 and L2, which may differ even…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

Based on the quantitative analysis of L2 English texts from Korean undergraduates, the present paper demonstrates the possibility of distinguishing L2 speaking proficiency with differing measures of syntactic complexity in English writing. To this end, 14 measures of complexity were gauged using an L2 Syntactic Analyzer (Lu, 2010) in 89 EFL essays…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

Crosslinguistic research into language development reveals that typological features determine children's developmental patterns to a large extent. The present study examines the early morphological development in the verb inflectional paradigm in Bangla. Data from the first 6 months since the emergence of two-word combinations were collected from…

This paper examines the English grammatical errors and their patterns in the written assignments of a General Education course at City University of Hong Kong. Subjects are 60 local and non-local (exchange) undergraduate students who are all L2 learners with diversified education and disciplinary background (i. e. their major of study) which are…

This research aims to address the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating. The significance of the study is to detect syntactic issues among Saudi Arabian undergraduate students. The question is addressed in the study: what are the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating? The researcher used a…

With the change in socio-political and educational contexts in global academia, the trend of writing academic papers has arisen among Nepali students and educators in higher education. However, many of them are still unfamiliar with the basic standard to be incorporated in an academic paper. In this context, this study examined the post-graduate…

How to support students in programming learning has been a great research challenge in the last years. To address this challenge, prior works have mainly focused on proposing solutions based on syntactic analysis to provide students with personalized feedback about their grammatical programming errors and misconceptions. However, syntactic…

This article addresses test translation review in international test comparisons. We investigated the applicability of the theory of test translation error--a theory of the multidimensionality and inevitability of test translation error--across source language-target language combinations in the translation of PISA (Programme of International…

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…