Do Heavy-NP Shift Phenomenon and Constituent Ordering in English Cause Sentence Processing Difficulty for EFL Learners?

Phrasal Ordering Constraints in Sentence Production: Phrase Length and Verb Disposition in Heavy-NP Shift

Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects at the end of a sentence rather than in the canonical postverbal position. Three experiments using several task variations confirmed that length of the noun phrase influenced the ordering of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase during production. We also found that heavy-NP shift was strongly con...

Chinese-Speaking EFL Learners’ Performances of Processing English Consonant Clusters

Locke (1983), studying world languages, found that some have word-initial clusters, some word-final clusters, and others consonant clusters in both word-initial and wordfinal positions. Considering negative transfer, linguists would claim native speakers of tongues without consonant clusters can have difficulty in phonologically manipulating target items with consonant clusters. Chinese differs...

Processing English Island Sentences by Korean EFL Learners

This paper took an experimental approach and investigated how Korean EFL learners process the English island constructions. Since there are some controversies on the existence of the island effects in Korean, the L1 transfer effect may make it difficult for the Korean EFL learners to learn island constructions in English. To examine if the difference between English and Korean affects the acqui...

Iranian EFL Learners' Processing of English Derived Words

An interesting area of psycholinguistic inquiry is to discover the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language. The current study probed into what goes on in the mind of EFL learners when processing derivational morphology and how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed. 60 Iranian EFL learne...

Post-verbal constituent ordering in English*

Online Processing of English Wh-Dependencies by Iranian EFL Learners

To be able to reach the level of ultimate attainment in the second language, learners need to acquire not only the grammar of the L2 but also the language processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences in real time. Contrary to its importance, very little is known yet about online L2 processing. This study examines whether advanced Iranian learners of English reactivate disloc...