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…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

Recent investigations have supported the suggestion that phonological speech errors may reflect the simultaneous activation of more than one phonemic representation. This presents a challenge for speech error evidence which is based on the assumption of well-formedness, because we may continue to perceive well-formed errors, even when they are not…

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated…

This study explored the relationships of self-reflection and insight with individuals' performances on various language tasks. The Self-Reflection and Insight Scale (SRIS; Grant, Franklin, & Langford, 2002) assessed individual differences in three factors: engagement in reflection, need for reflection, and insight. A high need for reflection was…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

We describe an analysis of speech errors on a confrontation naming task in a man with progressive speech degeneration of 10-year duration from Pick's disease. C.S. had a progressive non-fluent aphasia together with a motor speech impairment and early assessment indicated some naming impairments. There was also an absence of significant…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show impaired linguistic and/or narrative abilities. The present study aimed to document the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with TBI. 14 severe TBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS less than 8) in the phase of neurological stability and 14 neurologically intact participants…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

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 article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those…

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…

In this study, we compared two instruction methods on spelling performance: a rewriting instruction in which children repeatedly rewrote words and an ambiguous property instruction in which children deliberately practiced on a difficult word aspect. Moreover, we examined whether the testing effect applies to spelling performance. One hundred…