Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

The processing of structurally ambiguous sentences has proven resourceful in understanding the human parser. In particular, the resolution of globally and temporarily ambiguous relative clauses (RC) preceded by a complex noun phrase (NP) such as "Someone shot [the servant]NP1 of [the actress]NP2 [who was on the balcony]RC" has been found…

Errors are a reflection of competence level of language users. Therefore, with the purpose of understanding the competence level of teachers of English, the present study analyzed errors produced by twenty three non-native English speaking teachers pursuing a Bachelor of Education degree in Sri Lanka. Employing qualitative content analysis method,…

The study aims to analyze the distributional features of adverbial modifier of manner in two languages that are typologically and genealogically different: English and Azerbaijani. Although the issue has been focused in these languages separately from various angles including semantic, syntactic and prosodic perspectives, there is a gap in the…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

Since the colonization of the Americans, Filipinos have been using English as their second language and have been accustomed to using the language alongside local languages. The centuries of the extensive contact between American English and Filipino language raises questions pertaining language change and language identity. This paper reports the…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…

In this article, Lardiere responds to peer comments regarding her earlier article "Some Thoughts on the Contrastive Analysis of Features in Second Language Acquisition" (EJ831786). Lardiere acknowledges the reviewers' thoughtful contributions and expert expansion on various facets of the original article. While she states that it is clear from the…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…

This paper examines some of the rarely discussed aspects of Apachean classificatory verb stems with particular reference to Navajo and Western Apache. It is asserted that the concept of prototypes (and associated fuzziness) is useful in a description of Apachean classificatory verb stems, and that it can be used at two logically distinct levels of…

THIS BRIEF OUTLINE OF HINDI PHONOLOGY AND GRAMMAR IS INTENDED FOR FIRST AND SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF HINDI WHO HAVE SOME PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF THE ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE BUT WHO MAY HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS TRAINING IN LINGUISTIC TERMINOLOGY. THE AUTHORS HAVE THEREFORE EMPHASIZED SIMPLICITY AND READABILITY RATHER THAN EXHAUSTIVENESS OR ORIGINALITY…

This document describes a format for analyzing the information content of sentences and the language patterns that accompany particular information content. The author writes in terms of information structures, each information structure having a corresponding linguistic structure composed of distinctive features. The information structure of a…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…