This study investigates the effect of conventional and nonconventional expressions on listener comprehensibility. A forty-item comprehensibility test, including conventional expressions, interlanguage attempts, sociopragmatic deviances and alternative grammar constructions produced by French L2 (second language) speakers (N=27) was created.…

This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

Conventional expressions, a subset of multiword units, are the target of the current study, which aims to address questions concerning native and nonnative speakers' knowledge and processing of a set of such strings. To this end, 13 expressions identified as conventional in the southwest of France were tested in an online contextualized…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language. In this paper we argue that statistical learning can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners…

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, because her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order,…

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous…

Analyses the use of the French "en". (AM)

The nominal imperative, which serves to give an order in nominal rather than verbal form (e.g., "Silence!") presents a little-studied case of alternation between presence and absence of determiner in a nominal syntagm. Analysis of a French language corpus allows development of hypotheses on the meaning of certain types of determiners, or…

If it is immediate, definite anaphoric reference of an indefinite syntagm "'un'+noun" in French (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") seems appropriate for an "unfaithful anaphor" (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") but not a "faithful" anaphor (e.g., "un chien...le chien"). This rule helps to identify…

Reports three studies of comprehension of French subject relative clauses and two forms of object relative clauses. The first tested the hypothesis that competition between noun phrases, memory load, and perspective maintenance determine difficulty of role assignment in reversible relative clauses; others compared subject relatives and inverted…

Examines the differences in the way French and English treat contrastive stress and comparatives, with implications for translation. (AM)

Analyzes the structure of French distributive complements, including the formal and semantic similarities and differences among them. (AM)