The paper presents the first comprehensive look at the language development of Romani-speaking children from resource-poor Roma communities in several European countries. 250 participants aged 3- to 10-years participated. The experimental tasks assess knowledge in eight key areas of grammar and morphology, including fast mapping of novel items.…

The prominent role of allophonic cues in English speech segmentation has widely been recognized by phonologists and psycholinguists. However, very meager inquiry was devoted to analysing the perception of these noncontrastive allophonic cues by Arab EFL learners. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to examine the exploitation of…

This study investigated Thai EFL learners' acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford's (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against…

This paper investigated the "be"-insertion phenomenon in L2 English. L2 learners often insert "be"-forms before thematic verbs, creating nontargetlike forms (e.g. "She is love ice cream"). Based on L2 data from learners of topic-prominent L1s, a group of researchers have claimed that such "be"-forms are…

How languages are acquired and what stages learners go through has been the focus in language teaching area, and this cross-sectional study investigated the use of English adverbs by elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate level Turkish EFL students at Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages by analyzing it from acquisitional…

In this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. Several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. A final and overall evaluation…

This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

A significant body of theoretically motivated research has addressed the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in the nonnative acquisition of morphosyntax and properties of the syntax-semantics interface, but very little research has addressed the role of phonological principles of UG in nonnative language acquisition. Turkish has a regular and…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

This study assessed knowledge of numerically quantified English sentences in two learner populations--second language (L2) learners and deaf learners--whose acquisition of English occurs under conditions of restricted access to the target language input. Under the experimental test conditions, interlanguage parallels were predicted to arise from…

This study offers a Minimalist analysis of the L2 acquisition of binding properties whereby cross-linguistic differences arise from the interaction of anaphoric feature specifications and operations of the computational system (Reuland 2001, 2011; Hicks 2009). This analysis attributes difficulties in the L2 acquisition of locality and orientation…