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 ...

The majority of previous studies on multiple-cue judgment with continuous cues have involved comparisons between judgments and multiple linear regression models that integrated cues into a judgment. The authors present an experiment indicating that in a judgment task with additive combination of multiple continuous cues, people indeed displayed abstract knowledge of the cue criterion relations ...

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...

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...

Recently, a number of researchers have proposed the use of experimental methods to elicit acceptability judgments, thus addressing the shortcomings of the conventional intuitive way of gathering linguistic data (cf. Bard et al. 1996; Cowart 1997; Schütze 1996). The use of experimental methods allows to handle interand intraspeaker variation and to control for known biases on judgment behavior (...

Automatically judging sentences for their grammaticality is potentially useful for several purposes — evaluating language technology systems, assessing language competence of second or foreign language learners, and so on. Previous work has examined parser ‘byproducts’, in particular parse probabilities, to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical ones. The aim of the present paper ...

UNLABELLED This article reviews the some of the most widely used methods used for studying children's language acquisition including (1) spontaneous/naturalistic, diary, parental report data, (2) production methods (elicited production, repetition/elicited imitation, syntactic priming/weird word order), (3) comprehension methods (act-out, pointing, intermodal preferential looking, looking while...

Comprehension of filler-gap dependency relations (as in this is the man who the woman is touching) is supported by Broca's area. There are two views regarding the processing role of this brain region in comprehending these dependencies. Specifists hold that Broca's area plays a specific syntactic role in processing filler-gaps. Generalists maintain that as the on-line linking of fillers and gap...