This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency,…

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…

Ambiguities are naturally found in languages and largely categorized into lexical and syntactical ambiguities. They are responsible for ambiguous expressions and may cause confusion in readers; therefore, accurate evaluation of them is critical for clear writing which is one of the prominent prerequisites for academic writing. The literature shows…

It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch…

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…

The present study investigates the usage of speech like expressions in written works of Turkish learners of English. It also aims to find out the differences between C1 and B1 level learners in terms of the frequency and types of speech like expressions. The participants in this study were 21 B1 and 33 C1 level students at a state university in…

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…

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were…

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…

First language acquisition is implicit, in that explicit information about the language structure to be learned is not provided to children. Instead, they must acquire both vocabulary and grammar incrementally, by generalizing across multiple situations that eventually enable links between words in utterances and referents in the environment to be…

This study investigates L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection…

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…

This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…