Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

Purpose: This study examined language productivity and syntactic complexity in school-age children in relation to their knowledge of the topic of discussion--the game of chess. Method: Children (N = 32; mean age = 10;11 [years;months]) who played chess volunteered to be interviewed by an adult examiner who had little or no experience playing…

Although the problem of word class has been explored in numerous first language studies, relatively little is known about this process in SLA. The present study measures second language (L2) learners' knowledge of word class distinctions (e.g., noun vs. adjective) in a variety of syntactic contexts. English-speaking learners of Spanish from…

In this article I discuss the selection and assembly of formal features in second language acquisition. Assembling the particular lexical items of a second language (L2) requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the first language (L1) into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of…

The influence of English on German has been an ongoing subject of intense popular and academic interest in the German sphere. In order to better understand this language contact situation, this research project investigates anglicisms--instances of English language material in a German language context--in the German hip hop community, where the…

The recognition of second language (L2) development as a dynamic process has led to different claims about how language development unfolds, what represents a learner's linguistic system (i.e., interlanguage) at a certain point in time, and how that system changes over time (Verspoor, de Bot, & Lowie, 2011). Responding to de Bot and…

The number of transgender college students continues to increase every year. These students face unique challenges that many college and university career centers are not prepared to handle. This article describes some of the challenges facing transgender students and college career centers. A professional development design is proposed to assist…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

Most studies in the second language (L2) literature that deal with interface issues do so in holistic terms. On the one hand, researchers have suggested that interface relations between the syntax and other domains are particularly difficult for adult L2 learners. On the other, it has been argued that such relations can be established in a…

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The…

Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners…

In broad terms, this paper is concerned with adjunct construction in Persian, which is an Indo-Iranian Language. During the recent century, specially in its final decades, different researches have been done about adjuncts and adjunction among different languages, but despite the fact that they are very important in Persian language, no attempts…

Argumentation has become an increasingly recognized focus for science instruction--as a learning process, as an outcome associated with the appropriation of scientific discourse, and as a window onto the epistemic work of science. Only a small set of theoretical conceptualizations of argumentation have been deployed and investigated in science…

The present article investigates the acquisition of the pronominal systems by French and Italian monolingual children and by bilingual German-French and German-Italian children, demonstrating a stable asymmetry: object and reflexive clitics are acquired later than nominative clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. We will widen the scope…

Rationale: Functional transcranial Doppler sonography (fTCD) during word generation is well established for language lateralization. In this study, we evaluated a fTCD paradigm to reliably identify the non-dominant hemisphere. Methods: Twenty-nine right-handed healthy subjects (27.1 [plus or minus] 7.6 years) performed the "cube perspective test"…