This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of task repetition under four conditions on the three dimensions of oral production (accuracy, complexity and fluency) and grammatical knowledge gain of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 40 young learners of English as a Foreign Language in four classes were randomly assigned into one of the following groups: repetitio...

Formal semantics states that the meanings of phrases are composed from constituent parts and syntax. Little is known about how composition neurally implemented. We studied ERP behavioural responses to determiner-adjective-noun phrases. assessed effects typicality denotation, using intersective (typical: “A green turtle”, atypical: “An orange turtle”) or subsective adjectives slow fast turtle”)....

The present study investigated the effect of prior grammatical gender information provided by the production of a bare noun on the production of a syntactically unrelated, gender-inflected color adjective. The target language was Greek. A lexical priming task involving picture naming was employed. Participants saw a series of pictures, some in color and some in black-and-white; they had to name...

This paper explores the determinants of adjective-noun plausibility by using correlation analysis to compare judgements elicited from human subjects with five corpus-based variables: co-occurrence frequency of the adjective-noun pair, noun frequency, conditional probability of the noun given the adjective, the log-likelihood ratio, and Resnik’s (1993) selectional association measure. The highes...

English main-clause wh-questions form complementiser phrases with wh-words preposed to spec-C position. This is because English wh-words, as verb-complements originally, are strong enough to trigger wh-movement and auxiliary inversion. Persian EFL learners encounter an over-differentiation problem regarding the acquisition of auxiliary inversion rule in English standard questions. Once they hav...

This study examines phonological and phonetic properties of contrastive referential expressions. An interactive holiday tree decoration task provided sequences of ornaments to prompt production of target noun phrases in spontaneous conversation. This paper presents an analysis of a subset of referential expressions that were uttered in contrastive discourse contexts, focusing on the production ...

Compound noun has the similar structure to a simple sentence, for example, predicate-argument structure in many cases, as well as it represents compound meaning with several nouns combined. In this paper, we suggest a new method to analyze Korean noun phrases with posessive and compound nouns by using the statistical model based on verb-noun co-occurrence relations and word collocations between...