Research suggests that late bilinguals may have persistent difficulties with the automatic access and use of some second language structures because of a lack of underlying integrated knowledge of those structures. In contrast, early bilinguals show advantages in aspects of language use that require this type of automatic knowledge. This study…

This article reports on the development and validation of the English Diagnostic Test of Grammar (EDiT Grammar) for Japanese learners of English. From among the many aspects of grammar, this test focuses on the knowledge of basic English noun phrases (NPs), especially their internal structures, because previous research has indicated the…

Linking adverbials not only perform connecting functions between units of discourse but also facilitate the logical flow of a presentation and significantly affect the ways meaning is organized and conveyed by speakers and interpreted by listeners. The study examined comparatively L1 (n = 16) and L2 (n = 16) student presenters' uses of linking…

Many studies about listening strategies are based on what learners report while listening to an oral message in the second language (Vandergrift, 2003; Graham, 2006). By recording a video of the computer screen while L2 learners (L1 French) were listening to an MP3-track in German, this study uses a novel approach and recent developments in…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

This paper is a very preliminary attempt to look at how languages encode information. Different languages use different linguistic devices. Indian languages encode information morphologically or lexically. This provides flexibility in their word order. English, on the other hand, uses position for encoding information which results in a relatively…

The study examines whether speakers exaggerate prosodic cues to syntactic structure when addressing young children. In four experiments, 72 mothers and 48 non-mothers addressed either real 2-4-year old or imaginary children as well as adult confederates using syntactically ambiguous sentences like "Touch the cat with the spoon" intending to convey…

The applicability of Vantage Theory (VT), a model of (colour) categorization, to linguistic data largely depends on the modifications and adaptations of the model for the purpose. An attempt to do so proposed here, called Extended Vantage Theory (EVT), slightly reformulates the VT conception of vantage by capitalizing on some of the entailments of…

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in…

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and "si" constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and…

The present study takes as a point of departure Becker's analysis of the copula "be" in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula "be" in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Becker's study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the…

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)-S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish-L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces:…

The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in…

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced…