Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese-English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy…

The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

The current study aimed to gain insight into the nuanced challenges that Vietnamese learners encountered due to the interference of their native linguistic structures and norms. This qualitative study explored the experiences of Vietnamese learners in acquiring English, focusing on the influence of negative L1 transfer. This study focused on the…

This article reports on a comparative analysis of two sets of essays, student-discursive essays (SDEs) and ChatGPT-generated discursive essays (ChatGPT-GDEs) on the same essay topic using Coh-Metrix. It focused on three Coh-Metrix indices, lexical density, syntactic complexity, and referential cohesion as the basis for the comparative analysis.…

This study investigated second language distribution of Chinese connectives by tallying responses on a mini-discourse completion test taken by English-speaking learners with different language learning backgrounds and at different proficiency levels. The results showed that an underuse pattern underlay practically all Chinese connectives as a…

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) speakers' morphosyntactic pattern learning was predicted by their statistical learning and working memory abilities. Across three experiments, Thai English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students (N = 140) were exposed to either the transitive construction in Esperanto (e.g., "tauro…

For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African…

This qualitative study investigates discourse-level patterns typically employed by a Turkish lecturer based on the syntactic patterns found in the collected data. More specifically, the study aims to reveal how different native and non-native speakers of English perceive discourse patterns used by a non-native lecturer teaching in English. The…

Explores the relation of attitudes toward individual words and attitudes toward simple sentences made up of those words. Prediction equations showed a high level of accuracy. Bibliography and tables. (JB)

This study, consisting of two experiments, investigated the role of verb information in resolving ambiguous noun phrases (NPs) in reading comprehension. Both experiments extended earlier studies. The first measured and compared reading time for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous subject complements and unambiguous complements, which were…

Investigated how readers of different backgrounds evaluated 16 versions of Japanese university English as a foreign language (EFL) students' English compositions containing different culturally influenced rhetorical patterns. Results suggest that a flexible approach to permissible rhetorical patterns and a greater emphasis on coherence may be…

Examined the speech of Sudanese non-native speakers of English while they lectured to non-native English speaking students from in content-subject classes. The study was carried out to see whether lecturers simplified their language syntactically by proficiency level. Findings reveal that the lecturers used five different syntactic variables…

Three experiments investigated whether word order and case markers play a role in the native speaker's comprehension of Japanese. In Japanese, verbs are at the clause-final position and the order of words other than the verb appear to be flexible. The fact that verb information does not become available until the end of a clause suggests that…

This study investigated the process of acquisition of syntax in Japanese as a second language (JSL) in five university students over a period of 3 years. The report begins with an overview of Japanese syntax and an explanatory model of second language learning based on human information processing. Four phases of JSL learning with 16 sub-stages…