This study presents a comparative analysis of the clausal architecture and sentential negation in East (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), West, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian), and South (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Slovenian) languages. Using the Minimalist Program, I analyze the syntactic structure…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

There is a growing recognition that learning is increasingly taking place on the move and located beyond educational environments, "in the gaps of daily life" (Sharples et al., 2007). And yet, language learners have mostly been perceived as being fixed in particular contexts, whether in the educational environment, abroad, or in their…

A 2-layer symbolic network model based on the equilibrium equations of the Rescorla-Wagner model (Danks, 2003) is proposed. The study first presents 2 experiments in Serbian, which reveal for sentential reading the inflectional paradigmatic effects previously observed by Milin, Filipovic Durdevic, and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2009) for unprimed…

This paper describes student-level findings of the first large-scale comprehensive school effectiveness study of the primary education in Serbia. Twenty-five student-level variables were examined in a three-level HLM model using a study sample of almost 5000 students, over 250 classrooms and over 100 schools. Differences between the students were…

The interaction between length and lexical status is one of the key findings used in support of models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the orthography-to-phonology translation (B. S. Weekes, 1997). However, proponents of parallel models argue that this effect arises in peripheral visual or articulatory processes. The authors…

This study examines the motion verb system of Bulgarian, focusing both on the structure of the Bulgarian motion verb itself, and on the information typically encoded in the Bulgarian verb of motion. It then compares the Bulgarian motion verb system with the motion verb systems of two other Slavic languages, Russian and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian…

The aim of the article is to provide preliminary data on the use of auxiliaries and clitics in Serbian-speaking children with developmental language impairment. Two groups of children (a group of 30 children with developmental language impairment and a group of 30 typically developing children) aged between 48 and 83 months and matched on IQ took…

In this study, we investigate the relevance of inflectional paradigms and inflectional classes for lexical processing. We provide an information-theoretical measure of the divergence in the frequency distributions of two of the paradigms to which a word simultaneously belongs: the paradigm of the stem and the more general paradigm of the nominal…

This article focuses on a bookmaking project that was conducted with pre-adolescent Serbian and Bosnian girls at a summer camp outside Sarajevo, Bosnia in 2005. During this camp, children from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia were brought together by the Global Children's Organisation to engage in a variety of activities, including conflict resolution,…

This article seeks to explore how various language policies may have impacted Year 12 language candidature in Victoria. Australian Federal and Victorian State Government language policies are but one of the influences yet, it may be argued, the most significant influence. These stand alongside waves of immigration, global events and conflicts, and…

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low…

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10-4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their…

Using the case of Serbo-Croatian linguistic terminology as an example, discusses some of the problems of standardizing vocabulary across two more more languages. (EKN)

In this paper the author contends that no useful results can be obtained if contrastive analysis is confined to formal correspondence: it is not enough to compare languages as to the presence or absence of corresponding systems and as to the similarities or dissimilarities in the distribution of the terms of the contrasted systems. Formal…