The present paper examines the acquisition of the dative construction in Chinese, centering on issues raised in Baker’s Paradox relating to how children figure out that certain syntactic rules are not completely productive (Baker, 1979; Pinker 1989). We tested 29 Chinese speaking children from Taiwan, on a forced-choice grammaticality judgment test comparing double object constructions to prepo...

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...

The present study examined the acquisition of anaphora in English by Iranian EFL learners as well as Persian speaking children. To do so, the study was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, 40 intermediate female and male EFL learners were selected from Puyan Institute in Takestan, Iran. Then, an off-line based Grammatical Judgment Task was administered. In the second phase, 40 female ...

This paper improves an existing bilingual paraphrase extraction technique using monolingual distributional similarity to rerank candidate paraphrases. Raw monolingual data provides a complementary and orthogonal source of information that lessens the commonly observed errors in bilingual pivotbased methods. Our experiments reveal that monolingual scoring of bilingually extracted paraphrases has...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense...

Abstract: How do we process complex sentences like the dog the man walks barks? How are hierarchical grammars actually learned? And what is actually learned? Syntactical rule knowledge or the skill to use the hierarchical system for communicating meaning? Three Artificial Grammar Learning experiments investigated this question. The first experiment tested learning after exposure to exemplars of...

The present research investigates the acquisition of the English locative alternation by Korean EFL learners, which poses a learnability paradox taking Pinker’s framework of learnability theory as its basis. It focuses on two questions (1) whether the broad-range and narrow-range semantic constraints are operative in the interlanguage of Korean EFL learners as they are in L1 children’s and (2) ...

A Cognitive Grammar (CG) analysis of linguistic constructions has been claimed to be beneficial to second language teaching. However, little empirical research has been done to support this claim. In this study, two intact classes of Chinese senior high school students were given a 45-minute review lesson on the usages of the English simple present tense. Instruction for the experimental class ...

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task...