This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., "herself") and personal pronouns (e.g., "her") in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed…

The present paper addresses the study of non-arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non-arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence-processing neural networks are trained in a set…

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children's picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which…

This work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether "a/para"-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

This study investigated the relationship between second language (L2) speakers' success in learning a new morphosyntactic pattern and characteristics of one-on-one learning activities, including opportunities to comprehend and produce the target pattern, receive feedback from an interlocutor, and attend to the meaning of the pattern through self-…

Second language learning outcomes are highly variable, due to a variety of factors, including individual differences, exposure conditions, and linguistic complexity. However, exactly how these factors interact to influence language learning is unknown. This article examines the relationship between these three variables in language learners.…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) speakers' morphosyntactic pattern learning was predicted by their statistical learning and working memory abilities. Across three experiments, Thai English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students (N = 140) were exposed to either the transitive construction in Esperanto (e.g., "tauro…

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 article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of…

Many sociolinguistic studies validate the importance of the relationship among social variables that satisfactorily explain the correlation between linguistic and social phenomena. The intersection of sex, sociocultural level, and age initiates syntactic change that first appears in the vernacular and progresses to the accepted standard. (52…

Semantic noun classes in Emai, an Edoid language of Nigeria, are examined with respect to a process of Reference Point Marking (RPM) in order to explore the relationship between discourse and lexical semantics. Across pre- and post-verbal positions subcategorized by verbs like "rere" ("to be far"), these classes are shown to…