This study explores how Korean-to-English machine translation (MT) systems (e.g., Google Translator, NAVER Papago) deal with Korean passive structures. Cross-linguistically, Korean and English passives show different ways to construct passive-voice sentences from active structure. English passives including with [to be + past participle] may have…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

This cross-sectional study attempted to determine whether the English negation errors made by the University of Jordan's students were similar to the English negation errors proposed by Klima and Bellugi (1966), or influenced by the Arabic syntactic structures of negative sentences. Data of negative structures were gathered, and error counts were…

Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it…

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0-9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

In this article, we argue against the Representational Deficit Hypothesis, according to which second language (L2) speakers can never acquire functional categories or features that are absent in the first language (L1), suggesting that fossilization is inevitable. Instead, we support the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which argues that the ultimate…

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented root- and…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…