Student Research

MA and Ph.D.-level students supervised by the members of the Experimental Syntax Research Group have had significant success in publishing their work in leading journals. Topics range over a broad spectrum of experimental syntax, and there is quite a good share of publications in Scopus Q1 journals. The work entitled "Non-canonical coordination in Jordanian Arabic" by Rawan Aldiqs in co-authorship with Dr. Eman Al Khalaf and Prof. Bassil Mashaqbeh was published in the Open Linguistics journal in 2024. Their study reports empirical evidence obtained with experimental methods and provides a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon. In another research, Thawra Ali, an MA student under the supervision of Dr. Eman Al Khalaf, conducted a highly significant quantitative study on "The Acquisition of Argument Structure by Jordanian EFL Learners: The Case of Unaccusatives and Unergatives". In this research, 111 participants were included in a pre-test along with a grammaticality judgment task in order to examine how L2 proficiency as well as verb frequency affects the acquisition of intransitive verb subcategorization. Based on verb frequency data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and using R for analysis, the research shows that EFL learners understood unaccusatives more than unergatives; they were more accurate with the lower frequency of verbs and provided psychosyntactic evidence about argument positions for these verb types. The findings align with Sorace's Unaccusative Hierarchy Hypothesis, contributing valuable insights to second language acquisition research, particularly in understanding the complexities of argument structure acquisition by EFL learners.

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Experimental Syntax

Student Research