The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

Minority languages in diglossic situations with a majority language face the danger of eventual loss of vitality. The first sign of this is when child language acquisition begins to erode. This dissertation investigates the intergenerational transmission of the Isan language, spoken in the Northeastern region of Thailand. While the Isan community…

Recent research has shown that distinct event-related potential (ERP) signatures are associated with switching between languages compared to switching between dialects or registers (e.g., Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2007; Moreno, Federmeier & Kutas, 2002). The current investigation builds on these findings to examine whether contrastive and…

A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

Research by the staff and advanced students of the North Dakota Summer Institute of Linguistics is presented. In "Verb Agreement and Case Marking in Burushaski" (Stephen R. Willson), an overview of Burushaski morphology and syntax is presented, with special attention to verb agreement and case marking. "A Backwards Binding Construction in Zapotec"…

An understanding of the structure and function of discourse in social communication and in its internal representation to the individuals is sought in this multidisciplinary collection of papers. The approaches are divided into theoretical orientations and empirical orientations. The theoretical papers deal with: (1) comprehension in conversation,…

Papers in phonology, psycholinguistics, and syntax include: "Discriminating between Syntactic and Semantic Processing: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials" (Kim Ainsworth-Darnell); "The Syntactic Structure of Chinese Formal Focus" (Qian Gao); "Employing a Multimodal Logic in an Approach to German Pronoun Fronting"…

English instruction is successful when students learn to express significant ideas clearly in discussions, write with verve and grace, read with insight and enjoyment, and practice these skills beyond the realm of the classroom. This report discusses how to teach grammar and select literature in order to achieve those goals. Research and issues in…

Papers on a variety of linguistic topics include six papers from a Festschrift and nine others, as follows: "Attitudes Towards English as a Possible Lingua Franca in Switzerland" (Urs Durmuller); "Functional Stability and Structural Levelling of Dialects: The Case of Maastricht" (Anton M. Hagen, Henk Munstermann); "On the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 34 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the influence of rhyming verses on young children's ability to repeat rhythmic phrases; (2) schools of thought in linguistics; (3) the great vowel shift in the…

Papers presented at a 1977 symposium on language acquisition held at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee are included. Contents are as follows: "Assumptions, Methods and Goals in Language Acquisition Research" (Sheldon); "The Mother as LAD: Interaction between Order and Frequency of Parental Input and Child Production"…

Forty-one papers on language research and linguistic theory from the annual conference address these topics: linguistic philosophy; aspects of phonetics and phonology; topics in syntax; aspect; topics in semantics; topics in discourse analysis; sociolinguistics and language contact; historical linguistics; metatheory; and interdisciplinary…