Morphological knowledge is a complex construct integral to vocabulary breadth and reading comprehension. To understand its complexity, researchers examine its dimensionality. First, this study contributes to this broad topic by investigating whether morphological awareness and affix knowledge, related concepts with a long history of investigation…

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

This study compared the effects of task repetition only (TR), task repetition with grammatizing (TR+GR), and grammatization with no task repetition (GR) on 94 EFL learners' oral task performances. Participants' productions were measured both in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency as well as receptive knowledge (measured by an error…

This study examined the extent to which textual enhancement incorporated into the post-task stage of task-based reading lessons can promote development in second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. The participants were 49 child language learners who participated in task-based reading lessons in their own classroom contexts. They were randomly…

Using an original data set of task-based interviews, this paper presents findings on how Jewish day school students make sense of Biblical Hebrew verses in Biblical Hebrew. This paper pushes back against the convention in Jewish communal discourse to evaluate and label knowledge, shifting the focus instead to understanding how knowledge is…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

The Imperfect/Preterite aspectual contrast is one of the most studied topics in Spanish as a second language research. However, there are few works focused on describing the acquisition of modal uses of the Imperfect by L2 speakers. This paper investigates the L1 Russian L2 Spanish speakers' mastery of politeness, evidential and nonfactual modal…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

Finding out which teaching strategies best support students learning is a key objective of educational research. Knowing this, this study investigated the comparative effects of consciousness-raising (CR) tasks and dynamic assessment (DA) on morphological awareness in an Afghani EFL context. To achieve this, 90 EFL grade 11 learners from three…

This study examines the learning patterns of intermediate and advanced Korean learners in the acquisition of causative expressions according to their proficiency and the causative sentence type. We measured their grammatical knowledge using three types of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) and self-paced reading tasks (SPRTs) differing in time…

This study investigated the interactions among different cognitive abilities, linguistic structures, and the efficacy of different corrective feedback (CF) types. The cognitive abilities examined were declarative and procedural memory. The target linguistic structures were English regular and irregular past tense forms. In terms of the…

Concordancer tools have been used to help students learn aspects of written English by engaging them to access, examine, and analyze language examples in a corpus. Nonetheless, their efficacy remains uncertain when compared to other tools. This study compared a concordancer tool to Grammarly, QuillBot, Google search, online dictionaries, and…

The present study examined the relative effects of discourse-based and sentence-level grammar instruction on the learning of English present perfect in academic writing, using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Participants were 37 multilingual graduate students enrolled in different sections of an ESL-writing course at a U.S.…