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…

This empirical study investigated to what extend instruction (six-hour remedial teaching) aids recognition of compound complex sentences in teaching writing. The study also compared and contrasted students' recognition level of four types of sentences (simple, compound, complex and compound complex sentences) in teaching writing to find out the…

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…

This study examines L2 fluency in speaking interactions based on the number and type of utterances. The participants were 25 Korean eighth-grade learners of English as a foreign language. They performed five communicative tasks in groups, and their speaking interactions were audio-recorded and analyzed to measure the frequencies of sentence-level…

In Turkish, null and overt arguments do not show the same distributional properties at discourse level. There are discourse-pragmatic factors affecting this distribution (Kerslake, 1987; Ruhi, 1996; Turan, 1995; Çeltek & Oktar, 2014; Çeltek Kaili, 2017). Previous studies suggest that the acquisition of argument realization system in second…

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…

Applying a stylistic analysis on certain texts refers to the identification of patterns of usage in writing. However, such an analysis is not restricted just to the description of the formal characteristics of texts, but it also tries to elucidate their functional importance for the interpretation of the text. This paper highlights complexity as a…

This study explored the differences in the writings produced by both male and female students in colleges of education in Ghana with respect to syntactic complexity. The study was based on a corpus of two hundred examination essays which were collected from two hundred students in Assin Fosu, Wesley and Presbyterian colleges of education who took…

This study was designed as an explorative, descriptive, and observational/ experimental study. With a fluency oriented approach to quality, it aims at presenting and discussing the results of an experiment designed so as to explore the impact of sentence length and complexity on quality in Turkish-English SI. In addition, the self perceptions of…

Purpose: We investigated and compared the outcomes from two standardized, norm-referenced screening assessments of language (i.e., Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool--Second Edition [CELFP-2], Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation--Screening Test [DELV-ST]) with African American preschoolers whose spoken dialect differed…

Writing and writing clearly is a highly complex activity that requires the coordination of several processes and subprocesses for it to be effective and purposeful. Across those demands, syntax and the ability to express ideas with clarity can significantly affect a writer's ability to communicate (Berninger, Nagy, & Beers, 2011) and the…

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…