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...

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...

This study investigated whether the negative effect of complexity on artificial grammar learning could be compensated by adding semantics. Participants were exposed to exemplars from a simple or a complex finite state grammar presented with or without a semantic reference field. As expected, performance on a grammaticality judgment test was higher for the simple grammar than for the complex gra...

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...

This paper describes our approach to the 2016 QATS quality assessment shared task. We trained three independent Random Forest classifiers in order to assess the quality of the simplified texts in terms of grammaticality, meaning preservation and simplicity. We used the language model of Google-Ngram as feature to predict the grammaticality. Meaning preservation is predicted using two complement...

Several studies have reported an association between dyslexia and implicit learning deficits. It has been suggested that the weakness in implicit learning observed in dyslexic individuals may be related to sequential processing and implicit sequence learning. In the present article, we review the current literature on implicit learning and dyslexia. We describe a novel, forced-choice structural...

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in Experiment 1 (grammaticality judgment). In Experiment 2 t...

This paper contributes experimental evidence regarding the question of how relative pronouns are interpreted in English non-restrictive relative clauses with relative pronoun piedpiping (RPPP). Kotek and Erlewine (2015) and Erlewine and Kotek (to appear b) claim that the whrelative pronoun is sensitive to intervention effects inside its pied-piping constituent (cf Sauerland and Heck 2003, Cable...