This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly…

The purpose of the present study is to shed some light on the subtle interplay between oral and written academic genres in the context of graduate student academic presentations. The analysis was based on a corpus of successful TESOL graduate student academic presentations (n = 20) with a focus on the genre identity roles students encode in their…

A precisely controlled automated procedure confirms a developmental decalage: Infants acquiring English link count nouns to object categories well before they link adjectives to properties. Fourteen- and 18-month-olds (n = 48 at each age) extended novel words presented as count nouns based on category membership rather than shared properties. When…

A class of fourth-graders (nine-to-ten-year-olds) was taught art appreciation one day a week during an entire school year. Three years later their performance in visual awareness was tested and compared to the performance of pupils of the same age from another class who had not received any particular education in art appreciation. The results…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the real-time sentence processing of Korean both by native speakers and learners in terms of the availability and the effectiveness of different types of information in the structural prediction. Built on the crosslinguistically contrastive findings between Japanese in Yoshida (2006) and Chinese in…

This article presents the preliminary steps to the implementation of detection and correction strategies for the erroneous use of N+N structures in the written productions of French-speaking advanced users of English. This research is carried out as part of the grammar checking project "CorrecTools", in which errors are detected and corrected…

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ;…

The present study investigates the rhetorical structure of academic lecture closings, and the impact of class size on this part genre. A framework of "stages" and "strategies" is developed to analyze the rhetorical structure of lecture closings. Large and small classes are further compared to find how class size may influence the ways lecturers…

The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

The article deals with the meanings of the English preposition "by" in the IX-XIX centuries and their Azerbaijani equivalents. During that period the preposition "by" had more than 10 variants of writing. From the IX to the XIX centuries the preposition "by" was used in 6 main meanings: the meanings were connected…

Since at least Verkuyl (1972), aktionsart has been considered a property of phrasal configurations minimally resulting from a combination of a predicate and its internal argument. This has been demonstrated most clearly in the literature on telicity where certain predicate-argument configurations allow for a telic interpretation while others…

The present thesis investigates the role of semantic alternatives and logical strength in a number of empirical domains. Firstly, the thesis deals with the semantic contribution of focus on (bound) pronouns (chapters 2-3). The main results are as follows: First, focus on bound pronouns is interpreted by an operator (Rooth 1992b) in the scope of…

Determiner selection requires the retrieval of the noun's syntactic features (e.g., gender) and sometimes of its phonological features. Miozzo and Caramazza (1999) argued that the selection of determiners in Germanic languages is more straightforward than in Romance languages because it is not dependent on the phonological properties of the…