This article reports on the development and validation of the English Diagnostic Test of Grammar (EDiT Grammar) for Japanese learners of English. From among the many aspects of grammar, this test focuses on the knowledge of basic English noun phrases (NPs), especially their internal structures, because previous research has indicated the…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

We investigate linguistic relativity effects by examining whether the grammatical count/mass distinction in English affects English speakers' semantic representations of noun referents, as compared with those of Japanese speakers, whose language does not grammatically distinguish nouns for countability. We used two tasks which are sensitive to…

This study explored learning and retention of concrete nouns in second language Spanish by first language English undergraduates (N = 128). Each completed a learning style (visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic, mixed) assessment, took a vocabulary pretest, and then studied 12 words each through three conditions (matching, mismatching, mixed…

This dissertation investigates the neural and behavioral correlates of grammatical agreement computation during language comprehension in native English speakers and highly advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals. In a series of electrophysiological (event-related brain potential (ERP)) and behavioral (acceptability judgment and self-paced…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

The fact that English non-count abstract nouns such as knowledge are compatible with the indefinite article a/an is not only perplexing for second language (L2) learners of English but also troublesome for both native and non-native English teachers. This paper does research on this curious phenomenon of English grammar to clarify its mechanism…

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

In this paper, I describe research findings showing that young L1 listeners adopt various different strategies in differently structured situations. In particular, I show that nouns, particularly argument nouns, appear to be preferentially selected for attention when subjects are asked to listen under stressful conditions. Less academically…

This study discusses cognitive processes when speakers produce language in real time, with its focus on cross-linguistic differences in the procedural aspect of language use. It demonstrates that the syntactic characteristics of a language shape the speakers' overall process of sentence planning and production: how they construct sentential…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

This article presents a study of written development in English as a foreign language produced in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) environment. The texts analysed, from history classes, were collected annually over the four-year obligatory junior secondary education program from the same students (aged 12 to 16), in two state…

The present study investigates the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing a numeral quantifier and negation, such as (1) and (2), with a view to examining the interpretive preferences for Korean manifested by Korean-speaking children and adults, and the interpretive preferences for English manifested by Korean-speaking second…

This article identifies empirical evidence (Dao, 2007; in preparation) conflicting with Processability Theory's (PT) prediction that in acquisition of English as a second language (ESL), plural-marking emerges first in bare nouns and only later in numeric expressions. Specifically, it presents results from Dao's (2007) cross-sectional study of ESL…

This paper reports on the use of an English-language reading practice application for an Android tablet computer with students who are not native speakers of English. The application materials for vocabulary learning in reading-passage contexts were created to include words from a database of low-frequency and technical noun-verb collocations…