While most animals have communication systems, few exhibit such high-level of complexity as human languages. One central question of linguistics and cognitive science is to explore what human cognitive underpinnings and learning mechanisms are necessary to master such a complex system. One influential approach is Chomskyan generativism which…

The article, "morphosyntactic peculiarities of the speech of children with Down's syndrome", treats, important aspects of the study of two adjacent branches of linguistics, namely, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics-Language development of the child accompanied by speech disorders, on the other hand, those morphosyntactic features…

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form's linguistic and frequency distribution in second language…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

To investigate the narrative development of Chinese-speaking children aged 3--6 years, 80 children were prompted to tell personal stories. High point analysis was used and both narrative components and overall narrative patterns were analyzed. In terms of narrative components, Chinese children were more skillful in using complicating action,…

The paper examines how children quote their parents' utterances. In other words, it investigates linguistic recycling as an aspect of language learning and how the child-directed speech (CDS) of adults influences child speech (CS). This topic is examined especially in the light of research made in the crosslinguistic project on pre- and…

We examine metonymy at psycho- and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations (one- vs. two-mechanism). We compare highly conventionalized "systematic metonymy" (producer-for-product: "All freshmen read 'O'Connell'") to lesser-conventionalized "circumstantial…

The aims of the present study are: (1) to examine the methodological issues on the development of context-dependent and context-independent task development process in investigating the cognitive verb complementation patterns in English; and (2) to design and administer task items to analyze the learners' recognition and production levels in the…

Two experimental paradigms, a picture-naming task and a Stroop interference task, were employed to address the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon; more specifically, the process of multilingual non-selective lexical access. German-English-French speakers named objects in their native and most dominant language in a task that included a…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…