Speakers and learners, based on memory and experience, implicitly know that certain language elements naturally pair together. However, they also understand, through abstract and frequency-independent categories, why some combinations are possible and others are not. The frequency-grammar interface… read more
This chapter reviews Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies utilizing positron emission tomography (PET), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI tracks the changes in the metabolism of neurons when a language-related task is performed. It tells us… read more
This study investigates whether adult learners of Italian as a second language (L2) acquire Obligatory Control (OC) in non-finite gerundive adjuncts, which is the local relationship between the empty subject PRO in the adjunct and the subject of the main clause. Adjunct OC in Italian is neither… read more
Non-obligatory control (NOC) gerundive adjuncts (e.g. ‘By reducing the effectiveness of the treatment, patients remain contagious for a longer period’) are common in government documents and require readers to integrate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information to identify the subject of… read more
This chapter presents three themes that I have discussed with Mike Long on different occasions in recent years: The Discontinuity Hypothesis, the necessity to study the ‘intra-language’ (in addition to the ‘interlanguage’) and the uncertainty principle. The latter is the idea that abstract rules… read more
In the present contribution we tested how syntactic knowledge, associativelexical memory (AM) and working memory (WM) contribute to the processing of filler-gap dependencies (FGD) in 27 lower-intermediate L1 Chinese learners of L2 Italian. To test learners’ structural knowledge, pictures of a… read more
