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Maho Takahashi – ProQuest LLC, 2024
This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Computational Linguistics, Decision Making, Task Analysis
Jiayi Lu – ProQuest LLC, 2024
Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…
Descriptors: Language Usage, Phrase Structure, Grammar, Syntax
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Saldana, Carmen; Smith, Kenny; Kirby, Simon; Culbertson, Jennifer – Language Learning and Development, 2021
Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Syntax, Comparative Analysis, Language Variation
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Leal, Tania; Hoot, Bradley – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn--one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language,…
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Processing, Second Language Learning, Language Research
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de Zubicaray, Greig I.; Arciuli, Joanne; Kearney, Elaine; Guenther, Frank; McMahon, Katie L. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2023
Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Psychomotor Skills, English, Predictor Variables
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Hoot, Bradley – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure--identificational focus--which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills…
Descriptors: Hungarian, Native Language, Bilingualism, Syntax
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Tao, Yan; Williams, John N. – Language Learning, 2018
A hallmark of grammatical knowledge is the ability to parse novel syntactic structures. Previous artificial language studies have examined learning hierarchical structures, but few have involved meaningful language and shown generalization to novel structures. This study addressed this issue using the semiartificial language paradigm. The…
Descriptors: Generalization, Syntax, Second Language Learning, Control Groups
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Aravind, Athulya; Hackl, Martin; Wexler, Ken – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
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,…
Descriptors: Syntax, Pragmatics, English, Language Acquisition
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Smeets, Liz – Second Language Research, 2019
This article investigates near-native grammars at the syntax--discourse interface by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of two different domains of object movement in Dutch, which exhibit syntax-discourse or syntax-semantics level properties. English and German near-native speakers of Dutch, where German but not English allows the same…
Descriptors: Syntax, Second Language Learning, Indo European Languages, Semantics
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Pladevall-Ballester, Elisabet – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…
Descriptors: Native Language, Second Language Learning, Child Language, Bilingualism
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Hermas, Abdelkader – International Journal of Multilingualism, 2014
This study considers the upper limit of ultimate attainment in the L2 French and L3 English of trilingual learners. The learners are native speakers of Moroccan Arabic who started learning L2 French at eight and L3 English at 16. They are advanced in both languages. Four constructions representing the verb movement and null subject parameter were…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, French, English (Second Language), Semitic Languages
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Rothman, Jason; Iverson, Michael – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2013
This study tests native Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of second language (L2) Spanish in the domain of phonologically null object pronouns. This is a worthwhile first language (L1)-L2 pairing given that these languages are historically and typologically related and both seemingly allow for object drop. Nevertheless, the underlying syntax of…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Language Research, Spanish, Syntax
Hoot, Bradley – ProQuest LLC, 2012
In Spanish, it is most commonly claimed that constituents in narrow presentational focus appear rightmost, where they also get main stress (1a), while stress in situ (1b) is infelicitous. (1) [Context: Who bought a car?]. a. Compró un carro mi [mamá][subscript F]. bought a car my mom. b. Mi [mamá ][subscript F] compró un carro. However, some…
Descriptors: Spanish, Native Language, Intonation, Syntax