This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners' use of constructional information in a sentence-sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence-sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English…

Faculty and assessment professionals rely on Bloom's taxonomy to guide them when they write measurable student learning outcomes and describe their goals for developing students' thinking skills. Over the past ten years, assessment offices and teaching and learning centers have compiled lists of measurable verbs aligned with the six categories…

The pronunciation of regular past tense verbs seems to be difficult for most L2 learners, especially in L2 learners whose first language phonological system is different from the English one. It is predicted that Thai EFL students could encounter difficulties perceiving English coda clusters like the '-ed' ending sounds. For this reason, this…

Writing argumentative paragraphs is challenging even in one's first language (L1) since in order to fulfil their goals writers need to carefully choose among the available metadiscoursive tools and skilfully balance their use. Writing in a foreign language (L2) is even more challenging because language learners are usually familiar only with a…

Students of English as a second language (ESL) are often perplexed by English phrasal verbs (PVs) and must seek aid to understand the meanings of such phrases. Understanding an independent verb is simple, but the meaning of a verb can change depending on the context in which it is used as well as its object(s). In other words, since PVs using the…

The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine…

This study explored the potential effects of communicative tasks developed using a reformulation of a task-based language teaching called Automatization in Communicative Contexts of Essential Speech Sequences (ACCESS) that includes automatization of language elements as one of its goals on learner attention to form in task-based interaction. The…

This dissertation explores parallels between Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Determiner Phrase (DP) semantics, syntax, and morphology--including similarities in case-assignment, subject-verb and possessor-possessum agreement, subject and possessor semantics, and overall syntactic structure--in first language acquisition. Applying theoretical…

Research on recognition of complex words has primarily focused on affixational complexity in concatenative languages. This dissertation investigates both templatic and affixational complexity in Hebrew, a templatic language, with particular focus on the role of the root and template morphemes in recognition. It also explores the role of morphology…

Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's…

This study proposes to investigate the functions of morphosemantic in Meetei proverbs, particularly the attribution of different meanings of the lexical items in Meetei Proverbial verbs. Meetei society has been using proverbs in the all ages, stages of development, social changes, and cultural diversifications to mark their wisdom of social…

The paper identifies the major problems of the Chinese-English dictionary in representing collocational information after an extensive survey of nine dictionaries popular among Chinese users. It is found that the Chinese-English dictionary only provides the collocation types of "v+n" and "v+n," but completely ignores those of…

Native speakers of English are sensitive to the likelihood that a verb will appear in a specific subcategorization frame, known as "verb bias." Readers rely on verb bias to help them resolve temporary ambiguity in sentence comprehension. We investigate whether deaf sign-print bilinguals who have acquired English syntactic knowledge…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…

This dissertation investigates the knowledge of English non-finite complement constructions by near-native L1 Spanish/L2 English learners. In particular, this study concerns Object Control, Raising to Object, and "for"-type constructions. Although the three constructions look identical on the surface, they are in fact distinct syntactic…