It has been proposed that an implicit learning deficit explains the difficulties with grammar commonly observed in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study further investigates this link in two ways. Firstly, we investigate whether kindergartners with DLD have more difficulties with preposition understanding and…

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to…

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…

The study explores the extent to which the intrinsic complexity of relative clauses (RCs) and prior linguistic knowledge impact the acquisition of RCs by L2 learners. The study investigates the main sources of the erroneous and avoided types of English RCs produced by Persian-speaking learners of English at three proficiency levels. The data…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

This study investigated EFL learners' comprehension of scalar properties of three types of emotion verbs, namely, fear type, liking and disliking emotion verbs and compare their performance with instructors and native speakers of English. The participants were 38 nonnative pre-service teachers from ELT department at a state university in Turkey,…

Even young EFL learners who have not yet learned L2 grammar will notice language patterns if, when retrieving exemplars ("item-based patterns"), they succeed in making form-meaning connections (FMCs). Item-based patterns, termed formulaic sequences (FS), serve as a basis for creative constructions. Although learners are implicitly…

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of…

Event-related potential studies on second language processing reveal that L1/L2 differences are due either to proficiency, age of acquisition or grammatical differences between L1 and L2 (Kotz in "Brain Lang" 109(2-3):68-74, 2009). However, the relative impact of these and other factors in second language processing is still not well…

This study examines the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of subject-verb inversion word order in declarative sentences in German. A group of U.S. college students who participated in a semester-long study abroad program in Germany and were comparable in terms of preprogram oral proficiency levels and accuracy scores in…

This study investigates task-related variation in learner performance in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. For our study, we collected data from 15 beginner and then intermediate second language (L2) learners of German who worked on 3 distinct activity types over 16 months: free composition, translation, and sentence…

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1-3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical…

In response to new theoretical claims and inconclusive empirical findings regarding relative clauses in East Asian languages, this study examined the factors relevant to relative clause production by Korean heritage speakers. Gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (plus or minus animate), and the topicality of head nouns (plus or minus…

We examined developing bilinguals' use of animacy and word order cues during sentence interpretation tasks administered in each of their languages. Participants were 6- to 8-year-old children who learned Vietnamese as a first language and English as a second language (n = 23). Participants listened to simple sentences and identified the agent or…

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax-semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at…