English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

This study investigated the frequent grammatical errors, found in the writings of Arab students' taking English writing courses in AL-Hussein Bin Talal University Learners' errors were considered positively as the best sources to identify students' limitations in English writing. Therefore the present study intended to investigate the grammatical…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

The effect of religious priming has been studied in relation to a number of variables, most extensively with prosocial behavior. The effects of priming on cognitive domains, however, are relatively understudied. The present study examined the effects of religious priming, compared with reflective and neutral priming, on the conjunction fallacy.…

Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…

Although "Girls are as good as boys at math" explicitly expresses equality, we predict it could nevertheless suggest that boys have more raw talent. In statements with this subject-complement structure, the item in the complement position serves as the reference point and is thus considered more typical and prominent. This explains why…

Sentences involving definite DPs can give rise to a "simultaneous" reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the time introduced by the verb's tense or an "indexical" reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the utterance time. This article discusses an experiment showing that children prefer…

Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second…

This cross-sectional study examined the distribution of electronic texting patterns in academic writing and effects of textese on EFL learners' writing performance. It also explored teachers' perspectives on this phenomenon. Data were gleaned from 60 undergraduates enrolled for a license degree in English language and literature and 10 of their…

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in "Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice." Adults tend to link "he" with Puppy, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…

Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro…

Purpose: Non-rhotic varieties of English often use /?/ insertion as a connected speech process to separate heterosyllabic V1.V2 hiatus contexts. However, there has been little research on children's development of this strategy. This study investigated whether children use /?/ insertion and, if so, whether hiatus-breaking /?/ can be considered…

The term "formulaic sequence" (FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…