Abstract The aim of our study was to examine the longitudinal associations between two forms second language (L2) knowledge (i.e., explicit and implicit knowledge) activity types that facilitate different processing mechanisms form- meaning-focused processing). L2 English speakers completed tests (untimed written grammaticality judgment test metalinguistic test) three (timed test, oral producti...

Previous research has shown that listening to stories supports vocabulary growth in preschool and school-aged children and that lexical entries for even very difficult or rare words can be established if these are defined when they are first introduced. However, little is known about the nature of the lexical representations children form for the words they encounter while listening to stories,...

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining relationship between age onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie (phonological short-term memory and statistical learning), performance an auditory grammaticality judgment test (GJT). Participants were 71 Polish-English long-term bilinguals with a wide rang...

Whilst some locative verbs alternate between the ground- and figure-locative constructions (e.g. Lisa sprayed the flowers with water/Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers), others are restricted to one construction or the other (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/*Lisa poured the cup with water). The present study investigated two proposals for how learners (aged 5-6, 9-10 and adults) acquire t...

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and p...

The syntactician’s toolkit relies heavily on grammaticality judgements. Tests determining the structure of language often involve transforming a language fragment and then checking the grammaticality of the result. For example, distributional tests for constituency. However, determining grammaticality is not always a straightforward task. Tests for grammaticality have been characterized by two ...

this study investigated the effects of two types of written feedback – direct corrective feedback (dcf) and metalinguistic explanation (me) - on iranian efl learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge of english definite and indefinite articles. assigned to three groups of dcf, me, and control groups, the participants took four tests in three testing phases: pretest, posttest, and delayed posttes...

PURPOSE Clinical grammar markers are needed for children with SLI older than 8 years. This study followed children who were previously studied on sentences with omitted finiteness to determine if affected children continue to perform at low levels and to examine possible predictors of low performance. This is the first longitudinal report of grammaticality judgments of questions. METHOD Three...

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions ...