Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…

Existing research on second language (L2) pronoun resolution has not yet looked at immediate and cumulative priming effects. By using a sentence comprehension task, the present study aims at priming dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns. We test a group of native speakers and a group of intermediate-proficiency L2 learners of…

The term "formulaic sequence" (FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…

Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second…

An epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral singular pronoun used in sentences when the gender of the subject is unknown or unspecified. In English, "he" and "they" are commonly-used epicene pronouns. Until recently, "he" has been widely accepted as being grammatically correct. However, many have argued that he is sexist…

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form-meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse…

The subject slot is a main part of any English sentence (Martha & Robert, 2012). The recognition of the subject slot is therefore a crucial step in understanding and comprehending a sentence. This paper studies the effect of the internal structure of the subject slot on its recognition by students learning English as a foreign language (EFL).…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer "A and B" from sentences of the form "A or B." Although children's conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported…

The so-called depth charge sentences (e.g., "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored") were investigated in a comprehension experiment measuring both whether participants understood the stimuli and how certain they were of their interpretation. The experiment revealed that three factors influence the difficulty of depth charge type…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…