This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California. Research with monolingual Spanish and English speake...

objectives: nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. while the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on mandarin and korean and other languages have challenged this view. more recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in german, turkish, engli...

This paper aims to find out the qualia roles involved in metaphorical noun-noun compounds in Mandarin Chinese. Metaphor concerns the resemblance between things. From the perspective of qualia structure proposed by Generative Lexicon, the resemblance in metaphorical compounds can be interpreted in the way that a compound and its metaphorical component share the same quale role. A preliminary inv...

There are several theories regarding what influences prominence assignment in English noun-noun compounds. We have developed corpus-driven models for automatically predicting prominence assignment in noun-noun compounds using feature sets based on two such theories: the informativeness theory and the semantic composition theory. The evaluation of the prediction models indicate that though both ...

This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the no...

As children hear a novel verb in a NOUN-VERB-NOUN (i.e., NVN) structure, they generally infer that the verb is transitive, like the verb “hit” (Naigles, 1990; Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). However, the relationship between sentence structure and a verb’s transitivity status is not straightforward. Particularly, in typologically pro-drop languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the object in a se...

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was st...