This study aimed to examine errors in the written production of Chinese learners of English from a typological perspective. The thirty-nine participants were native speakers of Chinese enrolled in an undergraduate English course in Taiwan. Data were collected from a translation-elicitation task which involved ten Chinese sentences with Chinese TP (Topic-Prominence) features described by Li and ...

the present research aims to study the effects of syllabic structure in standard tajiki persian on the pronunciation of standard iranian persian words and the joint loanwords in these languages. this descriptive study used optimality theory, as a recent branch of generative grammar, to analyse the errors. to that end, ten tajiki-speaking persian learners, studying at imam khomeini international...

Categories, as mental structures, are more than simply sums of property frequencies. A number of recent studies have supported the view that the properties of categories may be organised along functional lines and possibly dependency structures more generally. The study presented here investigates whether earlier findings reflect something unique in the English language/ North American culture ...

Researchers have long been puzzled by the challenge English passive constructions present for language learners, with adult-like comprehension and production emerging only around the age of 5. It has therefore been of significant interest that researchers of other languages, including the Bantu language Sesotho, have reported acquisition of the passive by the age of 3 (Demuth, 1989). Such repor...

objectives: specific language impaired children, despite being normal in cognitive and neurological characteristics, and also normal levels of hearing, experience multiple problems in syntax comprehension. this study compared the passive comprehension as one of syntactic structures in persian-speaking typically developing children and specific language impaired children. methods: 10 children wi...

This study examined how cue-weighting of a non-native speech cue changes during early adult second language (L2) acquisition. Ten native English speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese performed a speeded AX-discrimination task during months 1, 2, and 3 of a first-year Chinese course. Results were compared to ten native Mandarin speakers. Learners’ reaction time and d-prime results became more na...

This paper examines whether English-speaking L2 Chinese learners are aware of the aspectual meanings that the two negation markers in Mandarin Chinese, 不 “not” and 没(有) “not” express. Test results show that while English-speaking L2 Chinese learners in the early stages of Chinese language acquisition do not have problems using 不 with activity verbs to express habitual negation, they do have pro...