The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) has long been considered pertinent to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, especially when the native language (NL) and target language (TL) have different NSP settings. The study aimed to investigate whether seventy English L2 learners in Puerto Rico who were native Spanish speakers transferred their L1…

Using computers to help students practice and learn grammatical constructions goes back to the earliest days of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). With the coming of the Internet age, CALL began to focus more heavily on the new capabilities of group connectivity and computer-mediated communication. More recently, a gathering consensus has…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an…

Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin & Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in…

An examination of the syntactic consequences of a notionalist grammar assumption supports the differentiation of major word classes in terms of combinations of notional features and predication or nominality components. (35 references) (Author/CB)

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets…

Quantifiers are discussed and evidence presented for their existential character in some cases. Their relation to surface and underlying structure is discussed. (RM)

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

Second and sixth graders were asked to learn noun pairs linked by various types of verbal connectives: Verbs, unmarked and marked comparative adjectives, polar antonym adjective pairs, and conjunctions. Results indicated that all contexts produced better learning than conjunctions, that comparative adjective effects were superior to the polar-pair…

Presents a contrastive study of connectives such as "in case that,""provided that," and "unless" focusing on the semantic properties of these items and their semantic and pragmatic equivalence across English and Italian. The article emphasizes that in its approach, pragmatic equivalence is strictly related to semantic…

The major targets of number agreement in English are pronouns and verbs. To examine the factors that control pronoun number and to test pronouns against a psycholinguistic account of how verb number arises during language production, we varied the meaningful and grammatical number properties of agreement controllers and examined the impact of…