This study investigates the grammatical skills of typically developing Oromo-speaking preschool-age children and lays the foundation for a language assessment tool for Oromo, a Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. The current study used a standard picture-based elicitation task that evaluated children's accuracy in producing grammatical…

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 study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a "yes-bias" towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs.…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

The present study employs regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) to investigate the effects of L2 speakers' chronic regulatory focus on their L2 pragmatic versus grammatical awareness. It involved the participation of 121 Chinese students, who are English language learners, at a university in the United States. Haws et al.'s (2010) questionnaire…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

Research on the acquisition order of inflectional morphemes in English has shown that third-person singular "-s" (3SG"-s") is challenging to acquire and acquired later than "be" copula by both L1 and L2 learners of English. In a departure from the usual practice of controlled elicitation, the current study…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

This study investigates the acquisition of null subjects by Mandarin Chinese native speakers ('Chinese NSs' hereafter), with different levels of L2 English proficiency, at initial stages of L3 Italian acquisition. The aim is to find out if, when acquiring Italian null subjects, Chinese NSs resort to their L1, which, like the L3, allows null…

This research investigated avoidance behaviour, one of the strategies L2 learners may resort to because of L1-L2 differences, or the non-existence of L2 structures for L1 learners, i.e. the Avoidance Behaviour Hypothesis (Schachter 1974). However, based on the Factors of L2 Non-Avoidance Hypothesis (FNAH) (Thiamtawan & Pongpairoj, 2013, 2019),…

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme…

This study examines the role of cross-linguistic transfer versus general processing strategy in two groups of heritage speakers (n = 28 per group) with the same heritage language -- Russian -- and typologically different dominant languages: English and Estonian. A group of homeland Russian speakers (n = 36) is tested to provide baseline…

Research suggests that prediction is important for language comprehension and learning. Accordingly, it becomes crucial to understand factors that can influence prediction. In this regard, speakers' prior linguistic experience such as parsing bias has been claimed to affect prediction in the error-based learning account. To test this claim, the…

Errors with "be", whether omission (e.g., "John happy") or overuse (i.e., "be"-insertion; e.g., "John is love Mary"), have received particular attention in L2 acquisition studies exploring L1 transfer. This study investigates such errors in the context of L3 acquisition, focusing on L1 transfer. L1-Chinese…