This methods showcase article provides a detailed overview of a mixed-effects modeling analysis of corpus data on the use of "that" in object and subject complementation by native speakers of English compared to its use by German and Spanish learners of English.

This study evaluated second language (L2) phraseological development using a directional association measure (delta P) that assesses the directional formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations. The study examined (a) whether learners develop their sensitivity to the distributional properties of recurrent multiword combinations as their…

This study examined the acquisition of a linguistic property that is underrepresented in the input available to second language (L2) learners, namely, interpretation of French strong pronouns as [-animate]. To understand how pronouns are used and interpreted and how this topic is treated in pedagogical grammars, three types of analyses were…

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light…

Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How…

The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

To date, there has been little empirical research exploring the relationship between implicit and explicit lexical knowledge (of collocations). As a first step in addressing this gap, two laboratory experiments were conducted that evaluate different conditions (enriched, enhanced, and decontextualized) under which both adult native speakers…

The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native…

This article investigates an argument-adjunct asymmetry in English as a second language (ESL) learners' acquisition of inversion in "wh"-questions. A generative approach (DeVilliers, 1991; Stromswold, 1990) claims that inversion is acquired earlier in argument "wh"-questions than in adjunct "wh"-questions, the asymmetry resulting from their…