The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the…

This study explored the influence of speech rate (normal vs. fast), sentence length (short vs. long), and second language (L2) oral proficiency on listening comprehension in L2 Spanish. Thirty-one native English-speaking learners enrolled in upper-level Spanish courses were aurally exposed to 8 sentences of each type of speed--length matrix, for a…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

Can a single adjective immediately influence message-building during sentence processing? We presented participants with 168 sentence contexts, such as "His skin was red from spending the day at the …" Sentences ended with either the most expected word ("beach") or a low cloze probability completion ("pool"). Nouns…

The article focuses on a current issue in modern linguistics: linguistic consciousness. Linguistic consciousness refers to the outcomes of mental activity, perception and assimilation of information verbalized by means of the national language. Theoretical issues with the functioning of the term of "linguistic consciousness" in…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of…

In most academic writing programs worldwide, instruction aims to develop students' awareness of essay types, written language use, and test-taking strategies. However, teachers' instructional practice is often dictated by their knowledge base, perception, and the intuitions they have about language use (Borg, 2006). Such intuitions are not always…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

EFL students' attitudes are crucial for the development of writing abilities, which in the age of cutting-edge technology depend extensively on artificial intelligence-mediated tools, and paraphrasing draws no exception. Therefore, this study aims to identify English as a foreign language student's enthusiasm and insights about utilizing QuillBot…

Narratives skills are associated with long-term academic and social benefits. While students with disabilities often struggle to produce complete and complex narratives, it remains unclear which aspects of narrative language are most indicative of disability. In this study, we examined the association between a variety of narrative contents and…

Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task. Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals (n = 30), early bilinguals (i.e., simultaneous; n = 27), or late bilinguals (i.e., sequential; n = 29) completed an English sentence repetition…

Purpose: Language difficulties are prevalent among children born preterm. Existing studies have largely used standardized language tests, providing limited scope for detailed descriptive examination of preterm language. This study aimed to examine differences in conversational language between children born < 30 weeks and at term as well as…

This study examines the knowledge representation of Japanese university students assessed using grammaticality judgement tests (GJTs) and a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT). The study also investigates the role of automatised and non-automatised explicit knowledge in general L2 language proficiency. Participants were 87 late learners of English…