In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

Bilingual children sometimes produce constructions influenced by their other language (cross-linguistic transfer). Transfer can often be predicted by the existence of overlapping and ambiguous constructions in both languages. In this paper, we investigate whether cross-linguistic transfer occurs when overlapping constructions exist, but there are…

Developing the ability to speak in a foreign language is an arduous task. This is because it involves the mastery of different language subsystems, simultaneous focus on comprehension and production, and the impact of a range of social factors. This challenge is further compounded in situations in which learners have limited access to the target…

This paper reports an assessment of the collocational competence of students of English Linguistics at the University of Granada. This was carried out to meet a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, we aimed to establish a solid corpus-driven approach based upon a systematic and reliable framework for the evaluation of collocational competence in…

Assuming the relevance of the linear precedence to the scope interpretation of adult Mandarin, this study investigated the development of this principle in Mandarin-speaking children, with a view to providing a basis for further study of parametric variation. Three kinds of sentences were examined, all of which contained mutually commanding…

Focuses on the influence of language specific properties in the acquisition of locative expressions. Some of the claims from literature on the acquisition of locative expressions are discussed and data from the acquisition of Warlpiri are presented and discussed in terms of these claims. (Author/CB)

Discusses the suggestion that grammatical-specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular the structure of the verb phrase with resultative…

Frazier and Clifton (2002) argue that a d(iscourse)-linked wh-phrase such as which boy attracts the reference of a pronoun in a subordinate clause. We translated Frazier and Clifton's materials from English into Romanian. Romanian is a pro-drop language in which null subjects are licensed by person and number agreement on the verb. We found that…