The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

Research in first-language (L1) sentence processing has found evidence that language comprehenders use binding condition A as a filter to rule out noun phrases that are binding-inaccessible before proceeding with the task of finding the correct antecedent. Sturt (2013) notes that this strategy does not appear to apply to advanced speakers of…

This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This…

To date, there has been mounting research evidence on the impact of written corrective feedback. In response to this, reviews have been conducted to condense either findings or methodologies through the combined analysis of EFL and ESL studies. Although syntheses shed light on the topic, no one provides exclusive insights into EFL realities.…

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

This paper provides an empirical study of word formation and lexical expansion in a set of Algonquian languages, considering 153 terms for each language. These terms range from words that predate European colonialism to more recent forms coined by English L1 speakers. We propose a classification of the methods of lexical innovation, which involves…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research for nearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages,…