Many corpus linguistic studies have investigated classification of texts into genres and registers, but relatively few of these studies have looked at linguistic features in educational registers. From a pedagogical perspective it is important to determine whether certain linguistic features behave differently across registers within particular…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

This study investigates whether two different means of learning the word sequence "despite the fact (that)" lead to differential outcomes of the acquisition of the grammatical structure imbedded in the word string which is, due to L1 transfer, especially problematic for Chinese learners of English. The participants of the study were randomly…

The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH; Bley-Vroman, 1989, 1990) contends that the nature of language in natives is fundamentally different from the nature of language in adult nonnatives. This study tests the FDH in two ways: (a) via second language (L2) poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) problems (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 2000) and (b) via a…

The purpose of the study is to investigate rating behavior between Korean and native English speaking (NES) raters. Five Korean English teachers and five NES teachers graded 420 essays written by Korean college freshmen and completed survey questionnaires. The grading data were analyzed with FACETS program. The results revealed Korean raters'…

This article focuses on the syntax of a number of subcategories of verb in French which are compatible with a following bare infinitive and which express various kinds of grammatical tense, mood, modality, aspect and voice, as well as such (more lexical?) notions as perception, causation and locomotion. The article starts by cataloguing a number…

Every language has some way of reporting what someone else has said. To express what Jakobson [Jakobson, R., 1990. "Shifters, categories, and the Russian verb. Selected writings". "Word and Language". Mouton, The Hague, Paris, pp. 130-153] called "speech within speech", the speaker can use their own words, recasting…

Agrammatism is--among others, characterized by a deficit in producing grammatical structures. Of specific difficulty is the utilization of complex, non-canonical sentence structures (e.g. object-questions, passives, object-clefts). Several studies have documented positive effects when applying a specific treatment protocol in terms of increasingly…

This paper reports on an experiment which examined the knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English (JLEs). The results of two grammaticality judgement tasks indicated that JLEs acquire the unavailability of an NP-shift operation relatively early, but their judgements of sentences involving V-raising (i.e., illicit *SV-Adv-O word…

This article is concerned with the proper characterization of subject omission at a particular stage in German child language. It focuses on post-verbal null subjects in finite clauses, here termed Rogues. It is argued that the statistically significant presence of Rogues, in conjunction with their distinct developmental profile, speaks against a…

This study investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. For the study, we developed a reading test which consists of invented encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. These articles enabled us to test various grammatical structures for their receptive difficulty. This paper discusses…

In order to discover some clues to and make suggestions for better teaching English pronunciation to learners in English as a Foreign Language (henceforth abbreviated as EFL) settings, the paper attempts to analyze Successful Foreign Language Learners (SFLL), focusing on their study history. The subjects were 24 junior high school students, who…

Four experiments investigate the scope of grammatical planning during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Experiment 1 shows that sentence latencies vary with length of sentence-initial subject phrase. Exploiting the head-final property of Japanese, Experiments 2 and 3 extend this result by showing that in a 2-phrase subject…

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…