This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

This dissertation examines the acquisitional process of middle se constructions by English- and Korean-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. Although clitic se is well known for its multifunctionality, there is a general tendency in the literature to analyze any use of "se" as a reflexive marker. This tendency is especially prominent in the…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This systematic review synthesizes the literature (involving 62 empirical studies) regarding the effectiveness of cognitive linguistics-inspired language pedagogies (CL-ILPs) on second language (L2) learning. It begins with an overview of the main theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics followed by a description of the data selection, coding,…

Quantifier-Negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This difference can be attributed to the underlying syntactic difference: the negation word can be raised at Logical Form in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This study investigated whether Chinese-dominant Tibetan heritage speakers know such difference. We…

Students are required to master effective sentences to support their writing skills. However, students often struggle with comprehending and constructing effective sentences due to their limited proficiency and competence. This research examines the comprehension of effective sentences through grammaticality judgment tests and its implications for…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into embedded questions, which are islands for filler-gap dependency formation in English. We ask whether there is evidence that Norwegian learners of English transfer the functional structure that permits island violations from their first language (L1) to their second language (L2). In two acceptability…

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

Board-games constitute a tool that simultaneously develops children in many ways and motivates them to learn. The aim of this experiment is to examine the effectiveness of using board-games in Romanian lessons and how the attitudes of Hungarian children change towards the Romanian language. To this end, the author created a board-game for…

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers' use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers' sensitivity to cues "all" and "any" in scalar implicature (SI) computation for "some." This article and our experimental setup does…

Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians…