This study is aimed to identify the effects of task complexity on first language (L1) use and the functions it may serve when two groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) work on collaborative tasks. Twenty-four pairs of Chinese EFL learners from two universities were assigned to a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group,…

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 investigated the relationship between the level of cognitive-linguistic difficulty of task input and the size of the cross-linguistic relationship for academic listening comprehension in emergent bilinguals. It was theoretically motivated by task-dependent cross-linguistic interaction frameworks. We hypothesized that task item sets that…

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

The Imperfect/Preterite aspectual contrast is one of the most studied topics in Spanish as a second language research. However, there are few works focused on describing the acquisition of modal uses of the Imperfect by L2 speakers. This paper investigates the L1 Russian L2 Spanish speakers' mastery of politeness, evidential and nonfactual modal…

In this study, we examined the accuracy and consistency of Greek-speaking children with spelling difficulties using a spelling level-matched design at two time points. Eighty-seven children were selected for inclusion in three groups: a group with spelling difficulties (SpD, n = 22 fifth graders) and two control groups, a chronological age-matched…

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…

First Language (L1) has been assumed to play a role in Second Language ability (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). However, the interplay between them across skill, task, or scoring criteria is more complex (Hamp-Lyons & Davies, 2008). Using Many-Facets Rasch Measurement, this study investigates the main effects of examinee ability, rater severity,…

The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in…

This study investigates pronoun interpretation by second language (L2) learners of English, focusing on whether first language (L1) transfer and/or processing difficulty affect L2 learners' pronoun resolution. It is hypothesized that L2 learners' non-target performance in L2-pronoun interpretation is attributable to two sources. The first is the…

The study investigates the effect of the perception of text and task difficulty on adults' performance in reading tests in L1 and L2. The relationship between the following variables is studied: (a) readers' perception of text and task difficulty in L1 and L2 measured in a self-reported post-task questionnaire, (b) the number of correct answers to…

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…

The study focuses on the effect of the lexical-syntactic structure on the patterns of errors by Arab first graders in tasks involving reading two-digit number and writing two-digit numbers to dictation. Children made few change or omission errors, indicating that they had little problem with the lexical aspects of the counting system. However,…

In L2 pragmatics, only a few studies have examined task complexity. Furthermore, the existing studies have predominantly focused on the cognitive dimension and have lacked consistent findings. González-Lloret and Ortega (2018) and Pallotti (2019) have thereby contended that socio-interactional features be incorporated into task design. Along this…