When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

In this commentary, the author defends the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roepe (A&R) in the present issue. Topics discussed include second language acquisition, the concept of developmental optionality, and the idea that structural decisions involve the lexical dimension. The author states that A&R's…

Previous research suggests that children's behavior with respect to the interpretation of indefinite objects in negative sentences may differ depending on the target language: whereas young English-speaking children tend to select a surface scope interpretation (e.g., Musolino (1998)), young Dutch-speaking children consistently prefer an inverse…

Johnson-Laird's reply to Fodor's book, Language of Thought (LOT) and to Fodor's position on Tom Swift often missed the point or were out of context. Doctrines expressed in LOT were quite compatible with those cited in Tom Swift. (RD)

Attempts to shed light on the selection of future time expressions in English tense usage. Descriptive accounts of time usage expressions are reinterpreted against the background of the theory of utterance interpretation known as Relevance Theory. (31 references) (Author/VWL)

Critiques previous research concerning differences in voice onset time discrimination between Spanish and English infants and conclusions about the effect of early linguistic experience on speech perception. (RMH)

Argues that Aslin and Pisoni's criticisms are basically unwarranted on both methodological and conceptual grounds. (RMH)

Justification offered by Steven Pinker for his theory that thought is independent of language, and that thought is couched in some silent medium of the brain ("Mentalese"), is outlined step by step and critiqued. It is argued that the theory ignores deep technical issues and is not explanatory. (MSE)

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

It is a good thing for the field of applied linguistics to adopt experimental methods of research where appropriate and to think more in terms of testable models of second language processing. However, there is a threat of psycholinguistics becoming the parent discipline, most likely temporary, of applied linguistics. This would be unwise for two…

Provides a brief overview of S. Krashen's language acquisition theory. Examples of exercises on French-English cognates are provided, and the role of cognates and of exercises on them in relation to the monitor theory is discussed. (SED)

This research is based on the assumption that a Spanish/English bilingual is aware of the phonological and semantic relatedness of the many hundreds of pairs of transparently cognate items in the two languages. This awareness is linguistically significant in that it is reflected in the internalized grammar of the bilingual. The bilingual speaker…

In linguistic analysis of the speech act, the data used to support theoretical conclusions are too often comprised of semantically isolated utterances of the ideal speaker-hearer. In reality, one of the most revealing kinds of data is imperfect data, where the functioning language processes are often unmasked. The study of first language…

Taking the lexicogrammatical resources (i.e. the vocabulary and syntax) of English as a starting point, this report explores the demands those resources put on the design of the part of a text generation system that supports the process of lexicogrammatical expression. The first section of the report notes that a reason for using the lexicogrammar…