Prediction error plays a pivotal role in theories of learning, including theories of language acquisition and use. Researchers have investigated whether and under which conditions children, like adults, use prediction to facilitate language comprehension at different levels of linguistic representation. However, many aspects of the reciprocal…

There is currently much interest in the role of prediction in language processing, both in L1 and L2. For language acquisition researchers, this has prompted debate on the role that predictive processing may play in both L1 and L2 language learning, if any. In this conceptual review, we explore the role of prediction and prediction error as a…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

This article proposes a novel account for the overuse of free morphemes and underuse of bound morphemes in English as a second language (L2) based on the framework of Distributed Morphology. It will be argued that an Economy Principle 'Do everything in Narrow Syntax (DENS)' operates in the L2 learner's computational system. Consequently,…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

The present study employs regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) to investigate the effects of L2 speakers' chronic regulatory focus on their L2 pragmatic versus grammatical awareness. It involved the participation of 121 Chinese students, who are English language learners, at a university in the United States. Haws et al.'s (2010) questionnaire…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

Research suggests that prediction is important for language comprehension and learning. Accordingly, it becomes crucial to understand factors that can influence prediction. In this regard, speakers' prior linguistic experience such as parsing bias has been claimed to affect prediction in the error-based learning account. To test this claim, the…

This dissertation explores the relationship between the parser and the grammar in error-driven retrieval by examining the mechanism underlying the illusory licensing of subject-verb agreement violations ("agreement attraction"). Previous work motivates a two-stage model of agreement attraction in which the parser predicts the verb's…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

The present study investigates integrated writing assessment performances with regard to the linguistic features of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Given the increasing presence of integrated tasks in large-scale and classroom assessments, validity evidence is needed for the claim that their scores reflect targeted language abilities.…

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

Subject-verb agreement constitutes a robust characteristic of French. However, especially at beginner and intermediate levels, second language (L2) learners might substitute or fail to recognize an infinitive for a conjugated verb, or a 3rd person singular form for a plural form, as "Les enfants mangera" (The children will eat--3rd…