Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic…

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we…

Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of…

We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

This guide draws on English-related errors from around 6000 papers written by non-native authors, 500 abstracts written by PhD students, and over 2000 hours of teaching researchers how to write and present research papers. This new edition has chapters on exploiting AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Translate, and Reverso, for generating,…

In the present study, children's early ability to organise words into sentences was investigated using the Weird Word Order procedure with Spanish-speaking children. Spanish is a language that allows for more flexibility in the positions of subjects and objects, with respect to verbs, than other previously studied languages (English, French, and…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Artificial intelligence revolution becomes a trend in most aspects of life. ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, has impacted various domains, including education and language learning. Enhancing writing abilities of ESL learners requires frequent writing practice and feedback, which ChatGPT can easily provide. However, ChatGPT's accuracy in identifying and…

The study examined the types of language errors made by learners in the English narrative essays. It also assessed the feedback techniques employed by teachers of English in the handling of language errors in the English narrative essays. A descriptive research design was employed to examine errors of English narrative essays of 181 form two…

Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial…

The present study was conducted to analyse the use of word order in job interviews. The data was collected from participants in an organisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ten candidates of different races between the ages of 23 and 25 participated in the study. Radford's syntactic theory of word order was employed to qualitatively analyse the…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals' interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in…

Visual input enhancement (VIE) increases the salience of grammatical forms, potentially facilitating acquisition through attention mechanisms. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing four linguistic cues (verb agreement, case marking, animacy, word order), with morphological cues either unmarked, marked in the…