This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation and is motivated by exemplar-based approaches to grammar. The study uses syntactic priming experiments to test the effects of participants' exposure to subject-verb agreement variants. Experiments also manipulate the gender, social status, and individual…

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is "wh"-scope marking, a cross-linguistically…

Six adult, second language (L2) English learners were observed over a period of one year to explore the development of lexical bundles (i.e., bigrams) in naturally produced, oral English. Total bigrams produced by the L2 learners over the year of observation that were shared with native speakers were compared using a frequency index to explore L2…

This study explores the influences that the Izon language manifests in the syntax of the English of Izon (Nigerian) speakers and makes a clear distinction between the influences that result in errors and those that result in permissible local variations, which indicates that the idea of treating all variations in the syntax of Nigerian English as…

Individuals with text-based neglect dyslexia omit words on the neglected side of the sentence or text, usually on the left side. This study tested whether the syntactic structure of the target sentence affects reading in this type of neglect dyslexia. Because Hebrew is read from right to left, it enables testing whether the beginning of the…

Two experiments examined English speakers' choices of count or mass compatible frames for nouns varying in imageability (concrete, abstract) and noun class (count, mass). Pairing preferences with equative ("much/many") and non-equative ("less/fewer") constructions were compared for groups of teenagers, young adults, and older adults. Deviations…

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

An enduring question in the study of second-language acquisition concerns the relative contributions of age of acquisition (AOA) and ultimate linguistic proficiency to neural organization for second-language processing. Several ERP and neuroimaging studies of second-language learners have found that neural organization for syntactic processing is…

This study examines the placement of finite and nonfinite lexical verbs and finite light verbs (LVs) in semispontaneous production and elicited imitation of adult beginning learners of German and French. Theories assuming nonnativelike syntactic representations at early stages of development predict variable placement of lexical verbs and…

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological…

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers…

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…

This pilot study examines the face work in two students' e-mail requests for letters of recommendation, to investigate whether and how the type and amount of face work differs in requests written in English and Spanish by native speakers of each language. The results do not conform to those of previous comparisons of requestive behavior between…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…