The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

Acquisition of verbs and their syntactic and semantic properties can act as the core of any sentence across languages. EFL learners encounter learnability problems in the perception of English verbs' argument structures manifested by different verbs. The current study aimed at investigating and diagnosing the problems Iranian EFL learners face…

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that second language (L2) learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate information at the external interfaces where grammar interacts with other cognitive systems. While much early L2 work has focused on the syntax-discourse interface or scalar implicatures at the semantics-pragmatics…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners' awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word's typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

This article reports on an empirical study on the acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers ("zai," "-zhe[subscript P]" and "-zhe[subscript R]") by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels. Compared to English, Chinese has a richer imperfective aspect in terms of markers (forms) and features (meanings).…

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition explain language development as a gradual process of generalizing constructions through language experience. This study investigated second language learners' development of constructional knowledge from the perspective of usage-based language development. A total of 169 Korean EFL students at five…

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected,…

By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean.…

One of the most researched challenges in learning Spanish is the acquisition and use of the past aspect, namely, the preterit and imperfect. L2 learners encounter this challenge due to differences in how native English and Spanish speakers view past events. Numerous studies on the Spanish past aspect have analyzed L2 learners' past aspectual…

While educators in South Korea have identified a need to change outdated practices of language pedagogy, continued utilization of the grammar-translation approach has perpetuated communication problems in a South Korean EFL context. To provide clinical analysis needed for effective reform, literal, figurative, and discursive aspects of formulaic…

Research on multilingual acquisition has investigated various combinations of languages to identify the factors determining how learners express motion. Our research examines the semantics of motion expression in learners whose first language (L1) exhibits more variation than their foreign language (L2/L3). The present study compares upward motion…

Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions ("so," "and," "although," or a "full…

This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners' use of constructional information in a sentence-sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence-sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English…