The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988; 2004). However, in spite of the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are often overlooked in preparatory English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. This mixed methods study aims to investigate to what extent CNP…

Using an oral sentence production task, we investigated how preschoolers (N = 28) produce agreement with complex noun phrases and compared their performance to college students (N = 32) to determine whether preschoolers produce agreement patterns that are qualitatively similar to adults'. We also conducted corpus analyses to investigate relevant…

The present study investigates native (L1) and second language (L2) processing of scope ambiguities in English sentences containing the universal quantifier every in subject NP and negation. Previous studies in L1 and L2 processing of scope ambiguities have found speakers to generally employ a 'minimal effort' principle that highly prefers the…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to repeat syntactic structures across sentences. We investigated the extent to which structural priming persists with age and whether the effect depends upon highly abstract syntactic representations that only encompass the global sentence structure or whether representations are specified for…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

The study was conducted to investigate the L2 acquisition of English generics by L1 Arabic speakers. The present study considered the two types of genericity (NP-level vs. sentence-level). Since generics in Arabic are always definite, the study investigated whether L1 Arabic speakers perform similarly in both types. The study recruited 43…

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the levels of receptive and productive knowledge of English collocations of Thai EFL university students and identify the types of grammatical and lexical collocations reported as most and least known by the students. The participants were 286 third-year regular students affiliated with four academic…

Based on Larsen-Freeman's (2001) three-dimensional (form-meaning-use) framework of grammar teaching, this study aimed to investigate which type of clause (noun, adjective or adverbial) was the most challenging for second/foreign language (L2) learners in writing skills. Depending on the results of a diagnostic test prepared in accordance with the…

This study uses both offline and online tasks in order to investigate whether second language learners of English from an article-less first-language (Mandarin) are able to integrate the indefinite article into their grammar despite the lack of articles in their first language. This article reports on two studies, one on learners' sensitivity to…

The difficulty in learning vocabulary is a problem that lies in not anchoring the new items to relevant established entities in cognitive structure. Different categories of associations have been reported to aid facilitating vocabulary acquisition. Collocating vocabulary items is a type of association that is considered to be more efficient in…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

In a recent article, Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, and Webb (2014) deplored the lack of effectiveness for the learning of verb-noun collocations of a number of exercise formats which they sampled from EFL textbooks and put to the test in a series of quasi-experimental trials. The authors called for further investigations into possible improvements…