Thai has imperfective aspectual morphemes that are not obligatory in usage, whereas English has obligatory grammaticized imperfective aspectual marking on the verb. Furthermore, Thai has verb final deictic-path verbs that form a closed class set. The current study investigated if obligatoriness of these grammatical categories in Thai and English…

Passives has been the focus of much research in language acquisition since the 1970s. It has been clear from this research that young children seldom produce passives spontaneously, particularly "long" or "full" passives with a by-phrase; and they usually perform poorly on experimental tests of the comprehension of passives, especially passives of…

The three objectives of this dissertation were to develop a question type model for predicting linguistic features of responses to interview questions, create a tool for linguistic analysis of documents, and use lexical bundle analysis to identify linguistic differences between fraudulent and non-fraudulent financial reports. First, The Moffitt…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

This study investigates second language (L2) development of Spanish verbal morphology, subject omissions, and subject-verb (SV) inversions by learners in two different proficiency levels and learning contexts. Oral narratives from 40 L2 learners at the intermediate and advanced levels, both at home and in a study abroad (SA) program, were examined…

This article presents the authors' comments on Nina Hyams' article, "The Acquisition of Inflection: A Parameter Setting Approach" (AIPSA). The article began as a 1986 presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Parts of it were also presented at the 4th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL) in 1987…

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven…

Much recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic work has aimed to elucidate the mechanisms by which sentence meanings are composed by investigating the processing of semantic mismatch. One controversial case for theories of semantic composition is expressions such as "the clown jumped for ten minutes," in which the aspectual properties of a punctual verb…

Allen [Allen, M. (2005). "The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit." "Brain and Language, 95", 255-264.] reports a single patient, WBN, who, during spoken language comprehension, is still able to access some of the syntactic properties of verbs despite being unable to access some of their semantic…

Electrophysiological techniques were used to assess the generalizability of concreteness effects on word processing across word class (nouns and verbs) and different types of lexical ambiguity (syntactic only and combined syntactic/semantic). The results replicated prior work in showing an enhanced N400 response and a sustained frontal negativity…

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: "ser"…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…

An evidential causal relation like, "Because most distinguished students got bad grades, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers," is more difficult to process than a factual one like, "Because he got tired after a long semester, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers" (Noordman & de Blijzer,…

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., "The frog is pushing the lion", when the lion was actually the "agent" or "doer" of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…