The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding…

This study aimed to explore the linguistic factors that influence the development and diversification of World Englishes along with implications for language teaching, learning, and policy, and to examine the trends in research related to WEs. Using a systematic review process with MAXQDA 20.2.1, the findings indicate that research on World…

Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

Despite the fact that Indian Sign Language (ISL) has a significant influence on the native signers in northeastern India, no studies of ISL have yet taken into account the nature of the sign languages in use in this region. This article examines the emergence of both Shillong Sign Language and the Deaf community of Shillong and discusses the…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

The article discusses the potential of combining learner corpus research with experimental studies in order to fine-tune the understanding of learner language development. It illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological approaches with data from an ongoing study of the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by French…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

The present article focuses on data collection through web questionnaires, as opposed to the traditional pen-and-paper method for research in second language acquisition and bilingualism. It is argued that web questionnaires, which have been used quite widely in psychology, have the advantage of reaching out to a larger and more diverse pool of…

This article critically reviews strategy research on learning Chinese both as a second and foreign language. Through a careful examination of major data bases in both the Chinese and English languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. Moreover, key limitations in research…

The current study lays the groundwork for a model of Mandarin tones based on both native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception and production. It demonstrates that there is variability in non-native speakers' tone productions and that there are differences in the perceptual boundaries in native speakers and non-native speakers. There…

LChildren pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE ("he's playing") and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted ("he playing"). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello,…