This study investigated Thai EFL learners' acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford's (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than…

This study examines how faithfully second language (L2) Spanish textbooks represent the variability found in natural language use with regard to variable clitic placement (VCP). We offer a corpus study of VCP in the language used throughout nine Spanish L2 textbooks, which constitute all the available textbooks designed to teach Rioplatense…

This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of affairs of generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA), 35 years into its history. This discussion brings the readership of SSLA up to date on the questions driving GenSLA agendas and clears up misconceptions about what GenSLA does and does not endeavor to…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

The incidental or implicit learning of vocabulary has long been a topic of interest in various disciplines. In studies on foreign language acquisition, reading is often the activity that researchers use to generate their findings. "Reading in a Foreign Language" has maintained its position at the forefront of this research, consistently…

We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…

While numerous training models aim to empower teachers by positioning them as active participants with agency and freedom, they often fall short in providing opportunities for training that seamlessly incorporates both the participants' own language and English. In this study, we used loop input (process and content aligned) in two languages that…

The present quantitatively-driven mixed methods study aimed at exploring the effect of musical input as a mode on intermediate L2 learners' knowledge and retention of difficult words. The data were collected in two phases. In the experimental phase, quantitative data were collected from 40 learners. An innovative method was used for the purpose of…

Specific features of adult linguistic input may play a larger, or smaller role, at different child ages, across different language outcomes, in different cohorts. This prospective, longitudinal study explored associations between the quantity and quality (i.e. diversity and responsiveness) of maternal linguistic input and child language. This…

The present study examined the effect of different vocabulary instruction methods on EFL learners' vocabulary learning and retention. Elementary and advanced EFL learners (N = 120), selected through convenience sampling, were randomly assigned to three conditions (i.e., six groups for the two levels). The learners in the explicit group received…

Enhanced Conversational Recast (ECR) is an input-based grammatical intervention approach developed from research on statistical learning. Recent research reported evidence demonstrating the efficacy of ECR on the learning of grammatically obligatory morphemes in English-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…