The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…

Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. However, the process of L2 derived word recognition is still poorly understood, with some arguing that the observed priming effects may not be morphological…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Scalar implicatures involve inferring the use of a less informative term (e.g. some) to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g. not all). A growing body of recent research on the derivation of scalar implicatures by adult second language (L2) learners shows that while they are successful in acquiring the knowledge of scalar…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

Interface properties have been found to exhibit protracted instability in advanced bilingualism and L2 learning (Sorace, 2000, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). This study examines the role of learning context in modulating this instability in an interface property, namely the interpretation of definite plurals in L2 Arabic. Generic readings in…

Emotion plays important roles in learning, memory, and other cognitive processes; it does so not only in the form of "macro-level emotion" (e.g., salient affective states and self-reportable motivational currents) but also in the form of "micro-level emotion" (e.g., subtle feelings and linguistic attributes that are usually…

Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…