Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…

This article describes the gathered experience in using corpora in an IELTS preparation course. The practice demonstrates an attempt to reduce negative washback effects occurring when preparation courses just concentrate on the test format neglecting the importance of development of learners' language skills and general study skills. Some…

Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

The language switching task has provided a useful insight into how bilinguals produce language. So far, however, the studies using this method have been limited to lexical access. The present study provides empirical evidence on language switching in the production of simple grammar structures. In the reported experiment, Polish-English unbalanced…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14…

The current study sets out to investigate collocational knowledge for a set of 13 English amplifiers among native and nonnative speakers of English, by providing a partial replication of one of the projects reported on in Granger (1998). The project combines both phraseological and distributional approaches to research into formulaic language to…

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause…

Event structure describes the relationships between general semantics ("Aktionsart") of the verb and its syntactic properties, separating verbs into two classes: telic verbs, which denote change of state events with an inherent end-point or boundary ("catch, rescue"), and atelic, which refer to homogenous activities ("tease, host"). As telic verbs…

The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English, focusing on the patterns exemplified below. (1) Korean a. VP-ellipsis: Sungki-ka phalan kabang-ul sa-ss-e-yo. Sunhuy-to-yey-yo Sungki-NOM blue bag-ACC buy-PST-DECL-POL Sunhuy-also-be-POL "Sungki bought a blue bag. Sunhuy did…

This study investigates how syntactic and semantic load factors impact sentence comprehension and BOLD signal under moderate hypoglycemia. A dual session, whole brain fMRI study was conducted on 16 healthy participants using the glucose clamp technique. In one session, they experienced insulin-induced hypoglycemia (plasma glucose at [image…

Separating text into meaningful language chunks, as with visual-syntactic text formatting, helps readers to process text more easily and language learners to recognize grammar and syntax patterns more quickly. Evidence of this exists in studies on native and non-native English speakers. However, recent studies question the roll of VSTF in certain…

Corpus linguistics has established that language is highly patterned. The use of patterned language has been linked to processing advantages with respect to listening and reading, which has implications for perceptions of fluency. The last twenty years has seen an increase in the integration of corpus-based language learning, or data-driven…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…