Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

Adjectival participles have been classified by their syntactic and semantic functions in many languages. Among the semantic functions, it is proposed that "reversible/irreversible interpretation" of those forms have a distinctive property. Like English, German, Greek and Turkish, it is claimed that Japanese adjectival forms have…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

Negation has been researched in second language acquisition in several languages (Bernini 2000; Donaldson 2017; Eskildsen 2012). However, there are very few studies that have discussed the acquisition of negation in L2 Spanish. In Alexandrino's (2010) dissertation, Grammaticality Judgment Tasks are employed to indicate that the acquisition of…

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…

This project investigates second language (L2) learners' processing of four types of Chinese relative clauses crossing extraction types and demonstrative-classifier (DCl) positions. Using a word order judgment task with a whole-sentence reading technique, the study also discusses how psycholinguistic theories bear explanatory power in L2 data. An…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that…

The dissertation examines the resultatives in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Mandarin) and Taiwanese Southern Min (henceforth Taiwanese), a notoriously difficult construction that has drawn extensive attention in the literature. With a microparametric approach, I offer a syntactic analysis for two kinds of resultatives, phrasal resultatives and…

The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the ongoing debate about the use of lexical bundles by first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of English. The study consists of two experiments that examined whether L1 and L2 English speakers displayed any knowledge of lexical bundles as holistic units and whether their knowledge was…

The study reported here compares two linguistically informed hypotheses on agrammatic sentence production, the TPH [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language," 56, 397-425.] and the DOP [Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). "Sentence production…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…

Contrasts symmetrical and asymmetrical features of word order in Mandarin and English, focusing on the preverbal and postverbal positional contrast, and revealing several cognitive sources for similarities between the two languages. (53 references) (CB)

Students in intermediate language courses, especially conversational courses, can benefit from a simple set of instructions for combining words and phrases into sentences. A description of the basic concepts determining word order in German--the fundamental sequence of clause elements, the "infrastructure," and the movement rules by which the…