Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

Experimental research on the interface between second language vocabulary knowledge, including collocations, and translation competence is scarce. The present study investigates the role played by three determinants of collocation knowledge (knowledge level -- recall versus recognition, congruency, and constituent word types) in the accuracy of…

According to previous research, speakers of European languages parse regularly-inflected, morphologically-complex words into stems and grammatical affixes during word recognition. In contrast, some studies suggest that late second language (L2) learners do not. We ask how these types of words are processed in Arabic, a language whose primary…

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate…

This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical gender facilitation and inhibition in second language (L2) learners' spoken word recognition. Native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender are sensitive to gender marking when hearing and recognizing a word. Gender facilitation refers to when a given noun that is preceded by an…

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…