Previous studies have used semantic verb categories to compare how speakers with and without aphasia use verb types during narrative monologue discourse tasks. In this study, we explore the types of verbs used by speakers with and without aphasia during conversation. Using previously collected conversational discourse samples produced by 23 adults…

The process by which infants learn verbs through daily social interactions is not well-understood. This study investigated caregivers' use of verbs, which have highly abstract meanings, during unscripted toy-play. We examined how verbs co-occurred with distributional and embodied factors including pronouns, caregivers' manual actions, and infants'…

Purpose: Many state standards for elementary students require them to use complex syntax, and research has documented age-related increases in the production of complex utterances in elementary-aged school children. Speech-language pathologists who provide services for these children, however, need detailed information in order to plan curriculum…

Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language…

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity of three sentence-focused diversity measures, intransitive verb diversity, transitive verb diversity, and third person (3P) subject diversity, using two methods: (a) group differentiation of late-talking (LT) toddlers from peers with typically developing (TD) language and…

Causation is a core feature of human cognition and language. How children learn about intricate causal meanings is yet unresolved. Here, we focus on how children learn verbs that express causation. Such verbs, known as lexical causatives (e.g., break and raise), lack explicit morphosyntactic markers indicating causation, thus requiring that the…

This dissertation examined two phonological and morphological changes in Ghamdi Arabic (GA), focusing on vowel harmony and gender distinctions. By comparing Prochazka's 1988 findings with recent data from 26 participants across two age groups. Participants consisted of 20 younger speakers (10 males and 10 females, ages 20 to 35) and six older…

Background: This paper examines assessment report-writing from a critical perspective, a relatively unexplored aspect of speech and language therapy (SLT) clinical practice. To date, there has been little discussion of the relationship between discourse formats, objectives of assessment reports, and the effects of these objectives on how clients…

This study was designed to investigate the translation of laws from Thai into English with a focus on the use of modal 'shall' in the translations. As the trend of plain legal English continues to rise in the contemporary legal environment, some legal practitioners -- lawyers, judges and legal drafters -- have perceived that the use of the modal…

Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

The study investigates the acquisition of Hebrew zero and pronominal subjects in the context of first and second person. We provide distributional evidence relative to verb tense, number, person, and conversational utterance type, in a peer-talk corpus (2;0-8;0 years). Findings show that acquisition starts early on, that verb inflectional…

Purpose: The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence…

Mandarin Chinese is widely believed to observe the Phrase Structure Condition (first proposed in Huang 1982; hereafter 'PSC'), a PF filter on phrase-structural representations that forbids the occurrence of two (or more) syntactic constituents in the postverbal field. This idea has proved highly important and influential, as witnessed by the fact…

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of…