This study investigated the relative effects of deductive and inductive form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of 4 non-generic definite article uses(cultural, situational, structural, and textual) as assessed by explicit and implicit outcome measures. The tests utilized to assess EFL learners' acquisition of definite article uses were timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests....

Fluency influences grammaticality judgments of visually presented strings in artificial grammar learning (AGL). Of many potential sources that engender fluency, symmetry is considered to be an important factor. However, symmetry may function differently for visual and auditory stimuli, which present computationally different problems. Thus, the current study aimed to examine whether objectively...

Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...

The present study was planned to investigate the efficiency of explicit teaching and adequacy of the L2 learners' exposure to L2 input in academic contexts in Iran. The case at hand was the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, as three different types of obligatory subjects in English. 96 Iranian EFL learners were selected from two universities in Isfahan. They were...

Introduction: Fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis and canonicity were scrutinized in Persian-speaking aphasics.  Methods: To this end, the performance of four age-, education-, and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca's patients and eight matched healthy controls in diverse complex structures were compared via the conduction of two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality jud...

In this study, we improve grammatical error detection by learning word embeddings that consider grammaticality and error patterns. Most existing algorithms for learning word embeddings usually model only the syntactic context of words so that classifiers treat erroneous and correct words as similar inputs. We address the problem of contextual information by considering learner errors. Specifica...

Previous work has shown that in English ungrammatical center embeddings are more acceptable and easier to process than their grammatical counterparts (Frazier, 1985; Gibson & Thomas, 1999). A well-known explanation for this preference for ungrammatical structures is based on working-memory overload: the claim is that the prediction for an upcoming verb phrase is forgotten due to memory overload...

Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first (L1) to L2. While evidence seems suggest that there are significant L1–L2 differences in processing RCs, relatively little is known about source non-target-like behaviour. The present study investigates grammatical acceptability different RC...

Recent studies on L2 acquisition focus how interface-related properties are acquired at the end state grammars. Proposed as part of this theme, Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace, 2011) claims that syntax-discourse interface is particularly challenging to acquire, irrespective L1 and speakers. On other hand, Full Transfer / Access (Schwartz Sprouse, 1996) predicts L1-const...

Theoretical linguistics traditionally relies on linguistic intuitions such as grammaticality judgments for data. But the massive growth of language technologies has made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alternative source of data. Moreover, studies of usage as well as intuitive judgments have shown that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are ...