Collocations are words that have a tendency to co-occur within a few words' spans, e.g., "drink coffee" and "dark chocolate" in English. Growing empirical evidence suggests that both native (L1) speakers and advanced second language (L2) learners process two-word collocations faster than unconnected word pairs, and that…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

This study investigates the hypothesis that non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings pose a greater challenge for non-native (L2) than for native (L1) speakers, focusing on a previously understudied phenomenon. We carried out an antecedent judgment task with L1 German and L1 Russian-speaking, proficient L2 learners of German to examine Condition C…

This study builds upon previous research investigating the construct validity of phraseological complexity as an index of L2 development and proficiency. Whereas previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons of written productions across proficiency levels, the current study compares the "longitudinal" development of…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as "wh"-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a "gap-driven" interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that "feed" is transitive may notice…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

Previous research has shown that L1-L2 congruency is a facilitative factor in collocation processing. The present study explores the congruency effect between learners' L2 and L3. Thirty-three proficient Norwegian learners with Lithuanian as their L1 and English as their L2 completed a phase acceptability task consisting of three groups of…

This study examined the extent to which textual enhancement and task manipulation affect the learners' attentional processing and the development of second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. A total of 73 Korean college students read an opinion news article in one of four experimental conditions: (1) textually enhanced, careful reading, (2)…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…