Purpose: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. Method: One hundred nine children were recorded…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

This study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2…

The purpose of this study is to expand the testing ground of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2006) by investigating the degree to which second language (L2) learners of Bulgarian with English as their first language (L1) had acquired the pragmatic function of clitic doubling as a topicality marker. Advanced and intermediate L2 speakers of…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

As historical relationships of Slavs and Albanians in the western Balkans have been subject to a wide range of scholarly interpretations, this dissertation seeks to present the facts of linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian contact, and apply them to an informed understanding of Slavs' and Albanians' interactions historically. Although individual…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

In Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), the gentive (G) and dative/locative (DL) cases exhibit adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). The genitive -"og" -"oga" and the DL -"om" -"ome" -"omu" stand in free variation, inasmuch as when one form is substituted for another the truth value of an utterance…

Four papers on syntax and morphology are presented. "Clitics in Slavic" (Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova) discusses the syntactic relevance of clitic placement across Slavic languages, and the functional categories that are or might be instrumental in determining placement of clitics and clitic clusters. In "A Promotion Analysis of…

Papers delivered at the conference on linguistics include: "On the Metrical Unity of Latinate Affixes"; "Epistemic Small Clauses and Null Subjects"; "Scrambling as Non-Operator A'-Movement: Variable vs. Null Epithet"; "Polarity, Inversion, and Focus in English"; "Phrasal Input to Derivational Morphology…