One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for meaning being associated with…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…

A study compared the effects of cognitive complexity on the speech production of 14 advanced non-native speakers of English and 14 native English-speakers. Cognitively simple and complex tasks were distinguished based on text type (narrative versus expository). Subjects read one narrative and one expository text in separate sessions, then wrote…