International Journal of English Language Teaching
Attachment Preferences of L2 Learners in a Production Task
Abstract
This study investigated whether L2 learners of English process sentences semantically or syntactically when they are
engaged in production rather than comprehension. Thirty-four Persian speaking second language learners of English
across two proficiency levels participated in a production task which involved completing sentences such as Andy
shot the man with… with a determiner phrase (DP) of their own choice. In majority of cases, the participants across
both proficiency levels supplied DPs that were semantically related to the verb (i.e., semantic-based processing). The
findings are argued to support the constraint-based theories and shallow structure hypothesis.
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References
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5430/ijelt.v5n2p50
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