Shakespeare molded language to meet his needs. Can students learn from his example? In this article, the author suggests studying Shakespeare's creative use of functional shift, spelling, and vocabulary to help students develop greater control of their own writing. The author is advocating that teachers approach Shakespeare as descriptive…

This dissertation examines the process of acquisition of semantic classes of reflexive verbs (RVs) in Russian by L2 learners with a native language English. The purpose of this study is to bridge the gap between current linguistic knowledge and the pedagogical literature existing in English on reflexives in Russian. RVs are taught partially and…

This dissertation is concerned with Chinese speakers' acquisition of telicity in L2 English. Telicity is a semantic notion having to do with whether an event has an inherent endpoint or not. Most existing work on L2 telicity is conceptualized within an L1-transfer framework and examines learning situations where L1 and L2 differ on whether…

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

Two studies investigated five- and six-year-old preschool children's narrative production in an attempt to show how LI may impinge on narrative production in measurable ways. Study 1 analyzed renderings of familiar stories for group (typical language development vs. language impairment), story content (Jungle Book/Goldilocks) and language…

Learning to use English articles appropriately has been considered a challenging task for L2 learners of English, especially when their L1s do not have a similar article system. Much research has been conducted in this area, but little has been studied about the effects of discourse types (i.e., spoken discourse versus written discourse) on the…

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found…

This qualitative case study explores how a novice foreign language teacher negotiated personal and professional identities and positioned herself and students in relation to classroom and broader cultural communities through pronouns. The participants included a Turkish teacher and six students at an American university. The teacher's use of…

Sociolinguists have been fighting dialect prejudice since the 1960s, but deficit views of non-standard English are regaining currency in educational discourse. In this paper I argue that the traditional sociolinguistic response--stressing dialect systematicity and tolerance of "difference"--may no longer be effective by questioning a key…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

The objective of this dissertation is to present a preliminary grammatical account of Asheninka Perene an endangered Arawak language of Southeastern Peru. The description and analysis of the language is based on the 29-week field research conducted in an area of the Southwest Amazonian high jungle. Interesting issues of Asheninka Perene grammar…

This dissertation investigates licensing conditions of dependent indefinite pronouns, such as negative concord items and pronouns that depend on the presence of a c-commanding quantifier. In Chapter 2, I examine freestanding negative concord items in Russian. I provide a novel empirical generalization that freestanding negative concord items…