The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

Using an oral sentence production task, we investigated how preschoolers (N = 28) produce agreement with complex noun phrases and compared their performance to college students (N = 32) to determine whether preschoolers produce agreement patterns that are qualitatively similar to adults'. We also conducted corpus analyses to investigate relevant…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar…

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages. The present experiment aimed at…

An online picture description methodology was used to investigate the interaction between lexical and syntactic information in spoken sentence production. In response to arrays of moving pictures, participants generated prepositional sentences, such as "The apple moves towards the dog," as well as coordinate noun phrase sentences, such…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…

Eye tracking was used to investigate how younger and older (60 or more years) adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., "park"). In event-related potential (ERP) work using the same materials, Lee and Federmeier (2009, 2011) found that young adults elicited a sustained frontal…

This study claims that Arab ESL students writing in English transfer L1 rhetorical modes of text organization into their English compositions. Fifty academic research papers were analysed in terms of the transition words and cohesive devices used, on the assumption that differences at the level of these language forms reflect differences at the…

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"…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…