The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

Language is of vital importance to human beings. It is a means of communication and it has specific cognitive links. Advanced social cognition is necessary for children to acquire language, and sophisticated mind-reading abilities to assume word meanings and communicate pragmatically. Language can be defined as a bi-directional system that permits…

Three studies investigated the comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle "only" by children and adults. Contrary to previous findings, two of the studies found that young children made errors predominantly by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

Through an experiment investigating the processes used by several speakers of Asian languages to decode passages by speakers of Australian English, this paper seeks to establish and categorize the types of problems encountered by multilingual speakers when decoding the speech of monolingual speakers in one of their (the multilinguals') second…

This report documents results of a two-year effort toward the study and investigation of the design of a prototype system for Chinese-English machine translation in the general area of physics. Previous work in Chinese-English machine translation is reviewed. Grammatical considerations in machine translation are discussed and detailed aspects of…

A Language-research experiment designed to examine the linguistic competence of bilingual Italian-American children demonstrates that structures shared by Italian and English are acquired in approximately the same order and at the same rate, and that the sequencing of specific structures reflects linguistic complexity. Structures appearing in both…