This dissertation investigates the soft typology of phonological patterns. By studying the types of patterns observed in the world's languages, we can do more than determine what is attested and what is unattested, or what is possible and what is impossible, but discover a wide range of more gradient phenomena. Phonological patterns range from…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the variable production of English Object-Experiencer (OE) psych predicates among 80 L1 Thai EFL first-year university students. Psych verbs are notable for posing difficulty for learners due to a unique property that violates Grimshaw's (1990) Thematic Hierarchy. The participants were given a cloze…

English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs (e.g. "gustar" "to like") across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &…

For this article we aimed to understand the emergence of English as a second language for a newly immigrated Mexican student, a native speaker of Spanish, enrolled in a mainstream kindergarten classroom, who was undergoing the "silent period" (Krashen, 1981). Applying ecological approaches that emphasize learners in relationship with their…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words…