This article focuses on the role of crosslinguistic patterns with verbs in the mapping of noun phrases/semantic roles to positions in morphosyntax, with a particular focus on second language (L2) development of Spanish se. The data set derives from high school learners of Spanish in the United States under broadly deductive and inductive learning treatments leading to explicit awareness. Using linear mixed effects modeling (LME) and binomial logistic regression, an analysis of high school learners from three schools (total n = 138) showed that learners based their acceptability judgments of aurally presented sentences and written production on verb classes proposed in formal linguistic theory. However, effects of the instructional intervention were limited to production data. No advantage for either deductive or inductive instruction was identified. The data show a clear role for formal linguistic categories in explaining patterns in the data. Implications for fine-tuning instructional intervention and testing of verb classes are discussed.

This study examined the extent to which second language (L2) learners’ syntactic prediction resembles or differs from native speakers’ and the role of L2 proficiency in this process. An experimental group of 135 Chinese learners of English and a control group of 58 English native speakers participated in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task where the experimental sentences were contrastive in whether the DP disjunction was preceded by either or not. To ensure that the participants had sufficient knowledge about the target stimuli, they were asked to additionally judge the acceptability of the experimental sentences. The results showed that like native speakers, L2 learners read the critical region consisting of “or” and a DP disjunct faster when it was preceded by either compared to when either was absent. In addition, this effect of the presence versus absence of either spilled over to the post-critical region. Moreover, L2 proficiency was not found to robustly modulate this process. It is concluded that L2 learners, like native speakers, can make predictions at the level of syntax.

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Biomass is the ideal substitute for petrochemical resources because of its renewable and abundant sources. p-Toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) can effectively separate lignin from biomass under mild conditions, so it is highly expected in biomass fractionation to improve the utilization efficiency. In this study, we investigated the effect of p-TsOH differentiated fractionation of poplar sawdust, eucalyptus sawdust, and rice straw below 100 °C. According to the experimental results, upon pretreatment by p-TsOH of the three kinds of raw biomass, most of the lignin and hemicellulose of poplar sawdust and eucalyptus sawdust were removed, whereas the cellulose was retained, but most of the hemicellulose and cellulose of rice straw were kept, whereas the lignin was removed at similar conditions. The structures and compositions of pretreatment residues, lignin, and hemicellulose extracted from raw biomass were characterized by XRD, FTIR, HSQC-NMR, XPS, and SEM. The differentiated fractionation mechanism of biomass was analyzed. A better recognition and understanding of the factors affecting biomatrix opening and fractionation will allow for the identification of new pretreatment strategies that improve biomass utilization and permit the rational enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose.

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