Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

Research shows that meaning-focused reading offers opportunities for incidental grammar acquisition. However, the number of such studies remains limited and none have examined the role of both in-text encounters with grammar structures and reading comprehension in this learning. The present study filled these gaps. Employing a between-group,…

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…

The present study employed a self-paced reading task in conjunction with concurrent acceptability judgements to examine how similar or different English natives and Chinese learners of English are when processing non-local agreement. We also tested how determiner-number specification modulates number agreement computation in both native and…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

This study investigates the processing of "wh"-dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition,…

In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

This study investigated the interactions among different cognitive abilities, linguistic structures, and the efficacy of different corrective feedback (CF) types. The cognitive abilities examined were declarative and procedural memory. The target linguistic structures were English regular and irregular past tense forms. In terms of the…

For many people, learning a second language as an adult is a challenging endeavor. Much interest in the study of adult second language learning has concerned the type of input that learners receive in their second language, with findings suggesting that second language learners are often exposed to a register of speech called 'foreigner talk' that…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

The present study employs regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) to investigate the effects of L2 speakers' chronic regulatory focus on their L2 pragmatic versus grammatical awareness. It involved the participation of 121 Chinese students, who are English language learners, at a university in the United States. Haws et al.'s (2010) questionnaire…

Learning new languages is a complex task involving both explicit and implicit processes (i.e., that do/do not involve awareness). Understanding how these processes interact is essential to a full account of second language (L2) learning, but accounts vary as to whether explicit processes help (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007), hinder (e.g., Ellis &…

The current study investigates second language acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis to probe the development of features transferred from learners' native language without robust confirming or disconfirming evidence in the second language (L2) input. It is argued that Chinese allows object ellipsis licensed by a verb with a [VCase] feature but…