Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Teaching grammar has always constituted a major part of language education in curricula around the world, although it has also been heavily debated. Most of the debate on grammar teaching focused on the rationales for teaching it, rather than on the linguistic content that should be taught. At the same time, there appears to be a renewed interest…

Early research on the Aspect Hypothesis yielded a rigid developmental sequence for the acquisition of grammatical aspect, in which developing L2 learners applied morphemes to mark aspect in accordance with the inherent lexical aspect of verbal prototypes. While studies from a variety of L2 backgrounds have amassed evidence for this hypothesis,…

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches…

This article provides a selective overview of recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies in L2 morpho-syntax, demonstrating that the ERP evidence supporting the critical period hypothesis (CPH) may be less compelling than previously thought. The article starts with a general introduction to ERP methodology and language-related ERP profiles…

This study employed synthetic and meta-analytic techniques to review the literature on the Cognition Hypothesis, which predicts that increasing task complexity influences the quality of second language production. Based on 8 inclusion criteria, 17 published studies were synthesized according to key features. A subset of these studies (k = 9) was…

There has been considerable research in Chinese as a second language (L2) in recent years, particularly in its morphological and syntactic aspects. This article reviews research in these aspects with reference to the broader discipline of second language acquisition (SLA) and suggests that L2 Chinese research has contributed to SLA through…

Purpose: This review introduces emergentism, which is a leading theory of language development that states that language ability is the product of interactions between the child's language environment and his or her learning capabilities. The review suggests ways in which emergentism provides a theoretical rationale for interventions that are…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Discusses the numerical distribution of the six logically possible orders of the Subject (S), Object (O), and Verb (V) across world languages. It is argued that the semantic relations of S, O, and V are best characterized as three concentric regions; S contained in O and O contained in V. (29 references) (Author/VWL)

This review article focuses on Derek Bickerton's book "Language and Species." The question of language origins are divided into two questions: (1) how did arbitrary elements acquire reference, and (2) how did syntax develop? It is suggested that the book is a closely reasoned attempt to fit linguistic theory into the framework of…

Argues that "outbound anaphora," contrary to the argument of Postal, is fully grammatical and governed by independently motivated pragmatic principles. The felicity of outbound anaphora is demonstrated to be a function of the accessibility of the discourse entity that is evoked by the word-internal element and to which the anaphor is…

An examination of the syntactic consequences of a notionalist grammar assumption supports the differentiation of major word classes in terms of combinations of notional features and predication or nominality components. (35 references) (Author/CB)

This paper presents an alternative analysis of tough constructions for N. Chomsky's 1981 wh-movement analysis of tough constructions. To replace Chomsky's solution and to obviate the need for generalized transformations in Government-Binding (GB) theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in which the tough subject originates as an embedded…

An examination focuses on several instances in which consonant mutation, whereby the initial consonant of a word or constituent undergoes morphophonological changes, occurs in standard literary Welsh. The syntactic and morphological means by which these mutations take place are considered, with emphasis on how an account of these mutations fits…