The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to investigate the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) framed within the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) on Thai learners' use of academic collocations and 2) to examine how Thai learners utilized the involvement load (IL) components (need, search, and evaluation) to master academic collocations. It is…

Second language (L2) acquisition research has explored the acquisition of various syntactic constraints by L2 learners, one of which is "wanna" contraction. However, there is still a very limited body of research regarding the acquisition of "wanna" contraction, both in first language (L1) and L2. The purpose of the study is to…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

The language behavior of field-dependent and field-independent female college students was examined in three different communication conditions with respect to length and type of verbal output. The conditions were dialogue, warm monologue, and cold monologue. (Author/AM)

Three major hypotheses were tested in this study: (1) there will be a greater frequency of forward and backward eye fixation for that linguistically defined area of a selected exprimental sentence which contains the verb, as compared to either the area of the subject or the area of the object of the verb; (2) there will be differences in the…

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…

Examination of the development of form/function relations of the prepositions "por" and "para" at different levels of proficiency in the interlanguage of study-abroad students in Granada, Spain, revealed "noncanonical" as well as "canonical" uses of these prepositions. The most common noncanonical uses were…

Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…

This study investigated how Korean adult learners of English at various levels of proficiency interpret English reflexives. The subjects consisted of 15 ninth-graders with 2.5 years of English instruction, 15 eleventh-graders with 4.5 years of instruction, 15 first-year college students with 6.5 years of instruction, and 15 graduate students who…

The materials employed in this investigation were 769 translations from Swedish into English made by Swedish university students studying English. The principal objective was to study aspects of learner behavior (in treating English word order) to obtain information about the types of errors Swedish students commit in English production and…

Investigates the real-time costs of sentence processing in early Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilinguals use an amalgam of monolingual strategies in choosing the agent of a sentence. The reaction time data reveal a larger language-specific component than the choice data. (37 references) (Author/CK)