This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

This dissertation is concerned with how elliptical sentences are generated. To be specific, I investigate when and in what module ellipsis occurs, and what is elided as a result of ellipsis. With regard to the first research question, I propose that XP ellipsis occurs as soon as all the featural requirements of the licensor of XP ellipsis are…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

The role of prosodic information in sentence processing is not usually addressed in second language (L2) instruction, and neurocognitive studies on prosody-syntax interactions are rare. Here we compare event-related potentials (ERP) of Chinese and German learners of English L2 to those of native English speakers and show how first language (L1)…

This study attempts to tease apart the effect of dominant languages of communication on the acquisition of syntactic properties of L3 French in order to test the current L3 generative theories. Three groups of bilinguals took part in this study: L1 Persian/L2 English, with French as the dominant language of communication, L1 Persian/L2 English,…

The current study tests the Interface Hypothesis through forward and backward anaphora in complex sentences with temporal subordinate clauses in highly proficient English-speaking learners' second-language (L2) Chinese. Forward anaphora is involved when the overt pronoun "ta" "he/she" or a null element appears in the subject…

Two studies examined the performance of English-speaking learners of French as a Second Language in three areas of French morphosyntax. In both cases, learners were found to increase gradually the structural domain in which they were able to operate as their level of competence improved. (Contains 62 references.) (MDM)