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With a growing number of returnees from abroad, there has been a steady interest on how their study abroad experiences had an influence on their L2 writing development. However, it is also undeniable that depending on when and how long they stayed in the host country, final attainment varies. Taking the onset age and length of residence into consideration, we designed our study to investigate returnees’ written products, particularly focusing on a cohesive feature called shell noun. The participants were 24 returnees currently residing in Korea at age between 22 and 30. All the participants received over 100 scores on TOEFL. They were grouped into two onset ages (the ages of 9-11 and 12-18) based on the sensitive period hypothesis. The results revealed that onset age was a decisive factor on shell noun frequency; however, length of residence did not predict use of shell nouns, when separated from age. There is not any difference in the use of lexico-grammatical patterns for shell nouns between the two groups of returnees, with the use of the shell noun view being the most frequent.
