The present study investigates whether or not Thai students' English writing skills can be improved by using an online grammar checker. First, typical syntactic errors made by undergraduate students majoring in English and English for Careers were examined. Secondly, possible reasons for syntactic errors in English writing in the light of Lado's…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…

Purpose: Language production in semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a lexical-semantic deficit and largely preserved argument structure and inflection production. This study investigates (a) the effect of argument structure on verb retrieval and (b) the interrelation between inflection marking and verb retrieval in SD. Method: Seven…

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 11-13 (N = 16) and an IQ-matched typically developing (TD) group aged 7-12 (N = 16) completed a graded grammaticality judgment task, as well as a standardized test of cognitive function. In a departure from previous studies, the judgment task involved verb argument structure overgeneralization…

This article studies the use of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the written production of learners of Spanish. SVCs are lexical combinations whose content is similar to verbal predicates but is distributed between a verb and a noun, the noun being the carrier of the core lexical meaning of the predicate. Although there is considerable…

Which conditional verb forms proved most difficult for Thai secondary school students to produce, and what errors resulted in written and spoken English, were studied. Data was collected from two tasks: 1) a gap-fill task by 68 twelfth-grade students in an integrated English program at a public high school in Bangkok, Thailand and 2) a spoken task…

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. "Marge pulled the box to Homer/*Marge pulled Homer the box"). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a…

This article presents the results of experimental data on language production and comprehension. These show that adult learners of Dutch as an additional language, with different language backgrounds, and a L2 proficiency below level A2 (Waystage) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001), use…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

This study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Thai language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast. 120 English paragraphs written by 40 second year English major students were analyzed by using Error Analysis (EA).The results revealed…

Children were asked to judge/correct sentences in which verb pairs, as predicates, could be associated with propositions or "arguments" which were obligatory for one verb and optional for the other. Results indicated gradual progression with age from initial ignorance to adultlike representation of obligatory and optional arguments for each verb.…

Tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as "don't giggle me." Ninety-six children were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. Found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and preemption, but only for…

A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

Addressed whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. Assessed in two experiments whether subject-verb agreement errors require linear proximity of a so-called "local" noun to the verb. Found evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to stage in which words…

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)