Children employ multiple cues to identify the referent of a novel word. Novel words are often embedded in sentences and children have been shown to use syntactic cues to differentiate between types of words (adjective vs. nouns) and between types of nouns (count vs. mass nouns). In this study, we show that children learning Malay (N = 67), a…

This study investigates the use of DO, HAVE, MAKE, GIVE and TAKE in light verb constructions (LVCs) and their corresponding simplex verb forms in British L1 and Malaysian L2 students' writing. The students' essay sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) of Great Britain (ICE-GB) and Malaysia (ICE-Malaysia) formed the data of this…

An increasing body of scholars have investigated noun phrase complexity in L2 English writing from varied perspectives, but few of them focus on the differences of the English writing produced by EFLs and ESLs. Thus, the study explored how three international postgraduates from China and three local Malaysian postgraduates in a top university of…