Young and older adult listeners paced themselves through recorded sentences, under instructions to recall the sentence verbatim or to respond to comprehension probes. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity and speech rate. Young and older adults paused longer after major syntactic boundaries, an effect that was constant across speech rates but became more pronounced with increasing syntactic ...

Although several studies have explored the effects of task sequencing on second language (L2) production, there is no established set criteria to sequence tasks for learners in L2 writing classrooms. This study examined effect simple ? complex manipulated along both resource-directing (± number elements) and resource-dispersing planning time) factors compared individual performance using Robins...

The favorable gains gleaned from the provision of pre-task planning time (PTP) have struck a chord with SLA researchers as they try to manipulate task features to promote language production and development. In a similar vein, the present study is a two-fold attempt to first compare the effect of the length of pre-task planning time on discourse-analytic measures in narrative written production...

Research background: The effectiveness of Corrective feedback has been a controversial issue and thus central part second language writing instruction worldwide.Gap in knowledge Purpose the study: It argued that provision written corrective can affect complexity text negatively, is not sufficiently investigated. Therefore, this studyinvestigated effects two types comprehensive strategies: direc...

Abstract The increasing importance of the Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) has led to research on linguistic characteristics its levels, as this would help application CEFR in design teaching materials, courses, and assessments. This study investigated whether levels can be distinguished with reference syntactic complexity (SC). 14- 17-year-old Finnish learners English (N=397) wrote t...

This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materials consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown ...

Broca's area is preferentially activated by reversible sentences with complex syntax, but various linguistic factors may be responsible for this finding, including syntactic movement, working-memory demands, and post hoc reanalysis. To distinguish between these, we tested the interaction of syntactic complexity and semantic reversibility in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of sente...