When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but…

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…

The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

Construction grammar (CG) has been proposed as an adequate grammatical formalism for building intelligent language tutoring systems because it is highly compatible with the learning strategies observed in second language learning. Unfortunately, the lack of computational CG implementations has made it impossible in the past to corroborate these…

While normal child language acquisition results in complete productive and comprehension abilities at a relatively young age, adult language acquisition is more belabored and often results in linguistic abilities that differ from those of native speakers in terms of both productive and comprehension abilities. A major line of research in language…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

This study investigated sentence-processing strategies adopted by advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of English in the context of an English structure with which NNSs reportedly have an acquisition difficulty (e.g., Swan & Smith, 2001)--namely, modal perfect (MP). Participants read MP sentences such as "He could have…

Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second language (L2) collocations using a framework based on Kroll and Stewart (1994) and Jiang (2000), by comparing the performance on a phrase-acceptability judgment task among native speakers of English, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) users, and Japanese…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

A number of researchers have suggested that formulaic sequences are stored and processed holistically (Altenberg, 1998; Raupach, 1984; Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Spottl & McCarthy, 2004). However, the evidence for this hypothesis has not been conclusive. The present study examined the representation and processing of formulaic sequences in two online…

Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5- to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of…