This study investigates whether potential differences in the weight of out-of-school and in-school learning environments affect acquisition L2 English by teenagers two geographical contexts, more less English-rich, with linguistic distance to English, respectively. Participants were groups 14-15-year-olds, from Denmark Spain. Language measures included a listening comprehension test, metalingui...

The dissertation explores word order phenomena in a ‘free’ word order language, Russian. It has been proposed in the literature that in simple sentences like ‘John sees Mary’, six word orders are equally possible in Russian. The dissertation questions the equal acceptability of these word orders and shows that some of the “felicitous” word orders have a degraded status compared to others. The w...

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don’t giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for why children retreat from overgeneralization err...

Abstract This study combines explicit (pen-and-paper) and sensitive (time-pressured) measures to gauge the impact of three instructional interventions (contextualized input with meaning-focused activities, contextualized word-focused decontextualized exercises) on learning 20 L2 French target verbs. Participants ( N = 313, L1 Dutch) completed a combination (form recognition, meaning recall, gra...

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is one of the most extensively employed paradigms for the study of learning. Grammaticality is one of the most common ways to index performance in AGL. However, there is still extensive debate on whether there is a distinct psychological process which can lead to grammaticality knowledge. An application of the COVIS model of categorization in AGL suggests that ...

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un- can be added to many verbs, but not all (e.g., roll/unroll...

The present study examined whether linguistic cognitive control skills were related to non-linguistic cognitive control skills in monolingual children (Study 1) and in bilingual children from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds (Study 2). Linguistic inhibitory control was measured using a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task in which children judged the grammaticality of sentences while ig...

This study investigated the effects of two types of written feedback – direct corrective feedback (DCF) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) - on Iranian EFL learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge of English definite and indefinite articles. Assigned to three groups of DCF, ME, and control groups, the participants took four tests in three testing phases: pretest, posttest, and delayed posttes...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...