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Showing 1 to 15 of 49 results Save | Export
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Celina Agostinho; Anna Gavarró; Ana Lúcia Santos – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…
Descriptors: Verbs, Grammar, Portuguese, Language Universals
Sedigheh Moradi – ProQuest LLC, 2021
This dissertation sets out to find an answer to the question why not all logically conceivable patterns are found typologically. In other words, my aim is to find paradigmatic gaps and explain their absence. In doing so, I use the mathematical notion of monotonicity (which is a more general term to convey order preservation) as proposed by Graf…
Descriptors: Generalization, Morphology (Languages), Syntax, Verbs
Hunter Nicholas McKenzie – ProQuest LLC, 2022
English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…
Descriptors: Verbs, Second Language Learning, Syntax, Grammar
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Teeranate, Kittirit; Singhapreecha, Pornsiri – LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network, 2022
This study investigated the acquisition of English "control" and "raising" ("over Experiencer") constructions with three groups of Thai EFL learners (lower intermediate, intermediate, and advanced). Thai and English, with respect to "control," commonly have PRO and infinitive markers, but Thai does not…
Descriptors: Grammar, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, English (Second Language)
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Pongyoo, Teerawat; Singhapreecha, Pornsiri – LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network, 2023
This study investigated Thai EFL learners' acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford's (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, English (Second Language), Verbs
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Getz, Heidi R. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Language Universals, Grammar, Language Usage
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Rankin, Tom – Second Language Research, 2023
Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…
Descriptors: Grammar, Linguistic Input, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning
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Qasem, Fawaz; Sircar, Shruti – Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2017
The paper shows that children acquiring Yemeni Ibbi Arabic4 (henceforth referred to as YIA) go through a stage equivalent to the Root Infinitive (RI) stage found in non-null subject languages in spite of the fact that YIA is a null subject and does not have an infinitive construction. Spontaneous speech of two YIA children (2;1-2;11) showed…
Descriptors: Semitic Languages, Language Acquisition, Language Classification, Sentence Structure
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Nam, Bora – English Teaching, 2020
This paper investigated the "be"-insertion phenomenon in L2 English. L2 learners often insert "be"-forms before thematic verbs, creating nontargetlike forms (e.g. "She is love ice cream"). Based on L2 data from learners of topic-prominent L1s, a group of researchers have claimed that such "be"-forms are…
Descriptors: Russian, Interlanguage, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning
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Jesus, Alice; Marques, Rui; Santos, Ana Lúcia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…
Descriptors: Semantics, Portuguese, Verbs, Preschool Children
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Suzuki, Takaaki; Kobayashi, Tessei – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…
Descriptors: Syntax, Cues, Grammar, Verbs
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Serratrice, Ludovica – Second Language Research, 2014
Amaral & Roeper's Multiple Grammars (MG) proposal offers an appealingly simple way of thinking about the linguistic representations of bilingual speakers. This article presents a commentary on the MG language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue, focusing on the theory's implications for child…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Native Language, Bilingualism, Transfer of Training
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Leischner, Franziska N.; Weissenborn, Jürgen; Naigles, Letitia R. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…
Descriptors: German, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Nouns
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Campos-Dintrans, Gonzalo; Pires, Acrisio; Rothman, Jason – Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2014
This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…
Descriptors: Syntax, Morphemes, Grammar, Second Language Learning
Lee, Eun Hee – ProQuest LLC, 2012
The general goal of this dissertation is to explore two decades-long second language (L2) acquisition issues: whether and to what extent the L2 learner's first language (L1) and Universal Grammar (UG) respectively play a role in L2 development. Targeting English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) and "wh"-extraction out of VPE, four…
Descriptors: English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Language Universals, Grammar
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