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…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988; 2004). However, in spite of the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are often overlooked in preparatory English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. This mixed methods study aims to investigate to what extent CNP…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

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…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

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…

Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week's interval were…

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…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

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…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

Developing small learner and native corpora, this case study examines how Korean L2 learners used six types of lexical collocations in L2 writing to address (a) the frequency and acceptability of learner collocations, (b) problematic constituents of deviant collocations, and (c) possible sources of the learner difficulties. The overall frequency…