Information-theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this…

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) has been extensively studied, yet past experimental results are often inconsistent or even contradictory. Overly simplistic examinations of grammatical complexity and learner characteristics (e.g., L2 English proficiency) may have fueled the confusion, limiting understanding of how different FFI techniques can be…

Mandarin Chinese verbs are composed of one to four characters that function together as a conceptual unit. However, in modern spoken Chinese, most of these verbs are two-character compounds. This dissertation is focused on adult second language (L2) learners' acquisition of these two-character verb compounds. Specifically, the acquisition of a…

This dissertation explored whether unnecessary linguistic complexity (LC) in mathematics and biology assessment items changes the direction and significance of differential item functioning (DIF) between subgroups emergent bilinguals (EBs) and English proficient students (EPs). Due to inconsistencies in measuring LC in items, Study One adapted a…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…

This research study investigated Turkish Tertiary Level EFL learners' recognition level of relative clauses. The study also examined the difficulty level of types of relative clause constructions for Turkish EFL learners and the effect of instruction on the learners' acquisition of English relative clauses. The data were gathered from two…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners' difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the…

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers' sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in…

This article explores English-speaking children's acquisition of raising structures with an experiencer (e.g.," John seems to Mary to be happy"). We review and address previously unnoticed issues in the methodologies of existing studies testing the acquisition of raising, thus providing a more reliable picture of children's abilities…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

Second language (L2) learners have been found to experience difficulty in tasks that require the integration of discourse-pragmatic properties with syntactic and semantic properties (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Valenzuela, 2006). The present article investigates the sources of L2 difficulty in a phenomenon where multiple…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…