While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers…

Creole-speaking contexts are significantly underrepresented in language and literacy research yet present a unique context for understanding the nature of language and literacy development among numerous learners in the Global South. In the Caribbean in particular, the poor writing outcomes of Creole speakers across all levels of education has…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize grammatical production in Jamaican Creole (JC) and English using the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) in a sample of typically developing bilingual Jamaicans. Method: Spontaneous language samples were collected in JC and English from 62 preschoolers aged 4-6 years.…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive grammar and vocabulary in a sample of preschool-age dual language learners (DLLs) who use Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. Adult models from the same linguistic community as these children were used to inform culturally and…

The present study examines the tradeoff between the on-line construction of modifier-noun gender agreement and verb-subject person/number agreement vs. the automatization and entrenchment of agreement, through the study of bilingual speakers of Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, whose lexicon is highly cognate with Spanish,…

This article provides the first systematic analysis of early subject omission in a creole language. Basing our analysis on a longitudinal corpus of natural production of Jamaican Creole (JC), we observe that early subject drop is robustly attested for several months. Early subject omission is basically confined to the clause initial position,…

This dissertation explores subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Palenquero Spanish (PL Spanish) and Palenquero Creole (PL Creole), two languages that have coexisted for centuries in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), share most of their lexicon, but differ in their grammar. Crucially, this study investigates how the contact between them and the…

Language, procedure, and identity are L2 teaching/learning essentials that may promote agency and stimulate synergies among knowledge, practice, and reflection (Diaz Maggioli, 2014; Duff, 2012). This meta-report presents three studies that collectively advance agency and endorse linguistic foundations as enrichment, differentiated instruction as…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

Despite their (albeit limited) access to Standard Australian English through education, Australian Indigenous communities have maintained their own dialect (Aboriginal English) for intragroup communication and are increasingly using it as a medium of cultural expression in the wider community. Most linguists agree that the most significant early…

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each…

Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and…

The findings for adverbs and adverbial phrases in a naturalistic corpus of Miami Haitian Creole-English code-switching show that one language, Haitian Creole, asymmetrically supplies the grammatical frame while the other language, English, asymmetrically supplies mixed lexical categories like adverbs. Traces of code-switching with an English frame…

This dissertation examines the Imperfective aspectual system of urban Bahamian Creole English (BahE), a mesolectal creole spoken in The Bahamas. Specifically, following Comrie (1976) I examine three Imperfective aspectual categories in the creole--continuous progressiveness (variable auxiliary "be" use with V- "ing" verbs and…