Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments…

Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings.…

Taking into account the peculiarities of the Georgian language and integrating them into the teaching process remains an important task. Georgian is an agglutinative language, which means the existence of grammatical markers in word-forms related to certain semantic features. The system of the Georgian verb is unique in that it is based on…

When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

Grammar teaching and learning is an important component to get mastery over any language. English language is being taught as first, second or foreign language in many countries. Consider whether inductive or deductive teaching is more effective for learning English grammar as a second language is a topic for contemplation. This study aimed to…

This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2 years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two…

Pronunciation is a crucial component of language acquisition, vital for achieving clarity and fluency in communication. This study, utilizing cycles of action research, aimed to evaluate the impact of songs on the pronunciation skills of Thai EFL learners. Additionally, this study explored the participants' perceptions of using songs in their…

Aims: This study compared two dose frequency conditions of an explicit intervention with 50 trials per session designed to improve past tense marking in early school-aged children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The influence of allomorphs on intervention effects was also examined. Methods: Data from previously conducted intervention…

Much crosslinguistic acquisition research explores finiteness marking in typical development and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Research into Russian, however, has focused on typical acquisition, not SLI. This article presents a first attempt to investigate finiteness marking in monolingual Russian-speaking children with SLI. We test two…