Quantifier-Negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This difference can be attributed to the underlying syntactic difference: the negation word can be raised at Logical Form in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This study investigated whether Chinese-dominant Tibetan heritage speakers know such difference. We…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical…

This study investigated whether task complexity may affect L2 speaking performance as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), and whether the effect of task complexity may interact with individual differences in working memory capacity. A total of twenty Korean advanced-level EFL learners performed two separate picture description…

The goal of this study is to investigate the role of working memory capacity in L2 attainment and performance. The study uses an L1 reading span task to measure working memory of a group of 59 high-intermediate/advanced learners of English, and a film retelling task to measure their oral production. The analysis first showed a moderate to high…