Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within…

This study contributes to current trends of heritage speaker (HS) acquisition research by examining the syntax of psych-predicates in HS Spanish. Broadly defined, psych-predicates communicate states of emotions (e.g., to love) and have traditionally been categorized as belonging to one of three classes: class I--"temere" "to…

This study explores the positive learning effect of formulating English sentences via Social Network Service (SNS; "Kakao-Talk") on less proficient L2 university students' (LPSs') writing, when the application is utilized as a tool to link in and out-of class activities in a multimodal-learning environment. Its objective is also to…

This study seeks to examine the existence of Instant Messaging language phenomenon among female teenagers in some Jordanian private schools and its influence on their learning experience, mainly literacy. It also raises questions about the characteristics of textese as well as teachers' attitude towards their students' use of SMS language in their…

Through examining all instances of the nontarget "be" before verbs in the written interlanguage of Chinese learners at different proficiency levels, the present study reveals that nontarget "be" performs different functions, and there is a function shift from low to high proficiency levels. At the lowest levels, "be"…

Construction grammar (CG) has been proposed as an adequate grammatical formalism for building intelligent language tutoring systems because it is highly compatible with the learning strategies observed in second language learning. Unfortunately, the lack of computational CG implementations has made it impossible in the past to corroborate these…

This essay formulates a rule for the use of the to+verb and verb+ing finite complements designed to help students and teachers of English as a foreign language. The rule results from an analysis of the distinction between the directional function and inceptive aspect of the to+verb form, rooted in the prepositional origins of to, and the…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation and is motivated by exemplar-based approaches to grammar. The study uses syntactic priming experiments to test the effects of participants' exposure to subject-verb agreement variants. Experiments also manipulate the gender, social status, and individual…

The present article investigates spatial- and social-cognitive processes in toddlers' mapping of concepts to real-world events. In 2 studies we explore how event segmentation might lay the groundwork for extracting actions from the event stream and conceptually mapping novel verbs to these actions. In Study 1, toddlers demonstrated the ability to…

This study examined the semantic processing difference between decomposable idioms and novel predicative metaphors. It was hypothesized that idiom comprehension results from the retrieval of a figurative meaning stored in memory, that metaphor comprehension requires a sense creation process and that this process difference affects the processing…

Individuals with text-based neglect dyslexia omit words on the neglected side of the sentence or text, usually on the left side. This study tested whether the syntactic structure of the target sentence affects reading in this type of neglect dyslexia. Because Hebrew is read from right to left, it enables testing whether the beginning of the…

This study examines the placement of finite and nonfinite lexical verbs and finite light verbs (LVs) in semispontaneous production and elicited imitation of adult beginning learners of German and French. Theories assuming nonnativelike syntactic representations at early stages of development predict variable placement of lexical verbs and…

In this dissertation, several related aspects of arguments to ditransitive verbs are explored. The aim is to discover in what ways certain asymmetries in what is frequently referred to as a "symmetric object" language are interconnected while still allowing the other symmetric object behavior. These asymmetries are: (1) The requirement that the…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of word order variation in declarative and interrogative clauses in Turkish within the framework of the generative syntax. The specific issue that will be examined in this dissertation concerns the role of discourse-pragmatics in word order variation. I will argue that all movement…