Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard…

This study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Thai language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast. 120 English paragraphs written by 40 second year English major students were analyzed by using Error Analysis (EA).The results revealed…

Since the seminal work of Gildea and Jurafsky (2000), semantic role labeling (SRL) researchers have been trying to determine the appropriate syntactic/semantic knowledge and statistical algorithms to tackle the challenges in SRL. In search of the appropriate knowledge, SRL researchers shifted from constituency grammar to dependency grammar around…

Purpose: The question of how and when English-speaking children acquire auxiliaries is the subject of extensive debate. Some researchers posit the existence of innately given Universal Grammar principles to guide acquisition, although some aspects of the auxiliary system must be learned from the input. Others suggest that auxiliaries can be…

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It…

Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of "pure" morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in…

This paper outlines key tone and voice quality properties in Phuthi, a Nguni (Bantu) language spoken in southern Lesotho and the northern Transkei (South Africa). The focus is the phonological presence of high tone (H) in Phuthi, and its interaction with other tones, both H and L. From verbs that employ a single H tone sponsor (lexical paradigms),…

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and…

In 1975 I published an article on Gilbert Ryle's task/achievement analysis of teaching (Marshall, 1975), arguing that teaching was in Ryle's sense of the distinction a task verb. Philosophers of education were appealing to a distinction between tasks and achievements in their discussions of teaching, but they were often also appealing to Ryle's…

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very…

Purpose: Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language…

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers' difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences…

Sociolinguistic competence is not often examined in nonnative English acquisition. This is particularly true for features where the variants are neither stylistically nor socially constrained, but rather are acceptable in all circumstances. Learning to use a language fully, however, implies being able to deal with this type of…

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence…

This study investigated sentence-processing strategies adopted by advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of English in the context of an English structure with which NNSs reportedly have an acquisition difficulty (e.g., Swan & Smith, 2001)--namely, modal perfect (MP). Participants read MP sentences such as "He could have…