Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity.

ABSTRACT: A large body of psycholinguistic research demonstrates that both language processing and language acquisition are sensitive to the distributions of linguistic constructions in usage. Here we investigate how statistical distributions at different linguistic levels - morphological and lexical (Experiments 1 and 2), and phrasal (Experiment 2) - contribute to the ease with which morphosyntax is processed and produced by second language learners. We analyze Chinese ESL learners' knowledge of four English inflectional morphemes: -ed, -ing, and third-person -s on verbs, and plural -s on nouns. In Elicited Imitation Tasks, participants listened to length- and difficulty-matched sentences each containing one target morpheme and typed the whole sentence as accurately as t

SUBMITTER: Guo R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8116661 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature