The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

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…

The Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and many of its dialects have been investigated, described, and analyzed morphologically by intensive previous research. However, the dialect of Sakakan tribes in the north region of the Arab peninsula has not received any adequate attention in this regard. Therefore, this research aims at describing, analyzing and…

Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn--one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language,…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

This article explores the role of transfer and Universal Grammar (UG) in second language (L2) phonology by investigating the L2 acquisition of stress/prominence in footless languages, such as Turkish and French, which have fixed word- and phrase-final prominence respectively. It is proposed that once the prosodic constituent Foot is projected in a…

In the present cross-linguistic study two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of age and linguistic background on response tendencies of preschoolers toward forced-choice questions. A total of 163 2- to 5-year-old children, including 63 Persian speakers, 57 Kurdish speakers and 43 English speakers, were asked a set of…

Previous studies have shown that older children gesture more while telling a story than younger children. This increase in gesture use has been attributed to increased story complexity. In adults, both narrative complexity and imagery predict gesture frequency. In this study, we tested the strength of three predictors of children's gesture use in…

"Cunt" is currently one of the most offensive words in the English language and is usually censored in the English press and media. The present study looks firstly at differences between 1159 first (L1) and 1165 foreign (LX) users of English in their perceived understanding of the word, its perceived offensiveness and their self-reported…

Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners' foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who…

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…

The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis (PPH, Cabrelli Amaro & Rothman, 2010) attempts to reconcile evidence suggesting some L2 learners, however rare, attain native-like L2 phonological systems with the observation that most do not. Considering existing L2 phonology research, it is not clear that phonological differences between early and…

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This…

Two experiments examined English speakers' choices of count or mass compatible frames for nouns varying in imageability (concrete, abstract) and noun class (count, mass). Pairing preferences with equative ("much/many") and non-equative ("less/fewer") constructions were compared for groups of teenagers, young adults, and older adults. Deviations…

Background: Children who are bilingual and have speech sound disorder are likely to be under-referred, possibly due to confusion about typical speech acquisition in bilingual children. Aims: To investigate what is known about the impact of bilingualism on children's acquisition of speech in English to facilitate the identification and treatment of…