Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

This empirical investigation rigorously evaluated the teaching potential of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) for enhancing the ability of learners to apply 30 near-synonymous change-of-state verbs in two EFL Freshman English courses in a college setting across two semesters. In the study, 32 participants in the experimental group and 22 in the control…

The Imperfect/Preterite aspectual contrast is one of the most studied topics in Spanish as a second language research. However, there are few works focused on describing the acquisition of modal uses of the Imperfect by L2 speakers. This paper investigates the L1 Russian L2 Spanish speakers' mastery of politeness, evidential and nonfactual modal…

Learners frequently encounter challenges in accurately utilizing near-synonyms in the English language. This investigation explored the similarities and differences among four near-synonymous verbs: "attempt, endeavor, strive," and "try." The analysis encompassed their prevalence across diverse genres, formality levels,…

Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), which provides access to learning without the constraints of place and time, is worthy of exploration for pedagogical purposes. Given the use of gaming applications and social media as potential instructional methods for MALL, this study investigated the effect of these two methods, along with traditional…

Purpose: The effects of animation on identification of graphic symbols for verbs were studied using the Autism Language Program Graphic Symbols Set in children diagnosed with mild-to-severe autism spectrum disorder between the ages of 3 and 7 years. Method: The participants were randomly assigned to an animated symbol condition or a static symbol…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

The translanguaging theory encourages language teachers to view their learners' linguistic backgrounds as a resource for creative expression. This article proposes an autoethnographically oriented application of the translanguging approach to studying emergent bilingual creativity in online communication. It includes three steps--storytelling,…

Google Translate is a free and practical online translation service that allows millions of people around the globe to translate words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs into an intended target language. However, in 2015, some Google Translate users in Indonesia, filed complaints, asserting that the machine was often inaccurate, speculating that…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

This paper is an attempt to present the morphological processes that have been observed in Sanzari Boro, an eastern variety of the Boro language. Boro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The Standard variety of Boro is mainly spoken in the present Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) of Assam, India but Sanzari Boro speakers primarily…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

The present study investigated the production of English passive constructions among Thai learners as syntactic asymmetry of the construction in question in Thai and English can be attested. In this study, English verbs were categorized into two types: Verb Type 1 and Verb Type 2. The former refers to those that can naturally occur in Thai…