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Haiquan Huang; Hui Cheng; Lina Qian; Yixiong Chen; Peng Zhou – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2024
"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Prediction
Helen Engemann – Journal of Child Language, 2024
Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…
Descriptors: French, Language Acquisition, Monolingualism, English
Sakine Çabuk-Balli; Jekaterina Mazara; Aylin C. Küntay; Birgit Hellwig; Barbara B. Pfeiler; Paul Widmer; Sabine Stoll – Cognitive Science, 2025
Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Native Language, Language Acquisition, Infants
Ergin, Rabia; Meir, Irit; Ilkbasaran, Deniz; Padden, Carol; Jackendoff, Ray – Sign Language Studies, 2018
One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…
Descriptors: Sign Language, Language Research, Language Patterns, Language Universals
Aribas, Derya Sekerci; Cele, Filiz – Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2021
This paper compares the initial state of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition for English articles to examine the influence of L2 proficiency on positive transfer from L2 to L3. We tested 36 L1 Turkish/L2 German adolescent learners of L3 English (L3 group), 41 L1 Turkish adolescent learners of L2 English (L2 group), and 10…
Descriptors: Comparative Analysis, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, English (Second Language)
Fedzechkina, Maryia; Newport, Elissa L.; Jaeger, T. Florian – Cognitive Science, 2017
Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…
Descriptors: Grammar, Diachronic Linguistics, English, Old English
Sabir, Mona – Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2019
This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…
Descriptors: Nouns, Arabs, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning
Choi, Sea Hee; Ionin, Tania; Zhu, Yeqiu – Second Language Research, 2018
This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…
Descriptors: Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Second Language Learning, English (Second Language)
Özçelik, Öner – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
According to the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (e.g., Tsimpli & Sorace 2006; Sorace 2011), external interfaces are more challenging for L2 learners than internal interfaces. It is not clear, however, if linguistic phenomena associated with external interfaces are necessarily problematic and if internal interfaces are necessarily unproblematic. In…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, Second Language Learning, Turkish, Native Language
Pearl, Lisa – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…
Descriptors: Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics
Suzuki, Takaaki; Kobayashi, Tessei – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…
Descriptors: Syntax, Cues, Grammar, Verbs
Leischner, Franziska N.; Weissenborn, Jürgen; Naigles, Letitia R. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…
Descriptors: German, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Nouns
Stringer, David – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2015
This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature--namely, that inversion with "wh"-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Computational Linguistics, Grammar, Indians
Campos-Dintrans, Gonzalo; Pires, Acrisio; Rothman, Jason – Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2014
This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…
Descriptors: Syntax, Morphemes, Grammar, Second Language Learning
Pearl, Lisa; Sprouse, Jon – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2013
The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG)…
Descriptors: Logical Thinking, Syntax, Brain, Learning Strategies