This study investigated second-language (L2) learning to gain a better understanding of learning mechanisms that also operate in child first-language L1 learners. The research was inspired by research on the beneficial effects of child-directed speech CDS. We tried to examine whether such benefits can be observed in the domain of inflectional…

Many researchers have found that learners go through stages in acquiring the L2 tense system: from relying on pragmatic devices to using more lexical devices, and then to using more grammatical morphology. Chinese is a language that has no tense (a [-tense] language) and relies on pragmatic and lexical devices to indicate temporal locations. The…

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the relative effects of processing instruction, structured input activities and explicit information on the acquisition of gender agreement in Italian adjectives. Subjects were divided into three groups: the first received processing instruction; the second group structured input only; the third…

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime…

One of the hottest literary phenomena of recent years has been the explosion of what has been variously termed hip-hop, street, or urban fiction. Especially popular with younger African Americans, books in this genre are reaching an increasingly broad readership through ties to hip-hop music and culture. These crime stories generally revolve…

Students more familiar with failure than success can carry inhibiting levels of fear, and mature students are twice as likely to drop out of Higher Education in their first year than younger students. Through its use of conversational and supportive tones, this study guide puts readers at ease assisting the transition to academic study. The author…

This study examines the differential effect of two types of written corrective feedback (CF) and the extent to which language analytic ability mediates the effects of CF on the acquisition of articles by adult intermediate ESL learners of various L1 backgrounds (N = 91). Three groups were formed: a "direct-only correction" group, a "direct…

It has been argued that extended exposure to naturalistic input provides L2 learners with more of an opportunity to converge of target morphosyntactic competence as compared to classroom-only environments, given that the former provide more positive evidence of less salient linguistic properties than the latter (e.g., Isabelli 2004). Implicitly,…

The grammatical phenomenon in Japanese known as Ga-No conversion is examined. In this phenomenon, the nominative particle "ga" can be converted to genitive particle "no" in embedded sentences with a nominal head such as a relative clause or complementary clause. A pragmatic constraint to this conversion that has not previously been explored is…

A discussion of Bolanci (also Bole or Bolewa), a West Chadic language spoken in northeastern Nigeria, focuses on one component of the system of complementation, the form "na." This form has an inherent semantic capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded, specifically, when present in a complex sentence,…

The level of mastery of selected language forms among English as a second language students in Botswana was investigated. Eighty-four pupils in the third to the sixth year of formal education provided oral English samples in unstructured formats involving language experience stories. The oral language of the pupils was analyzed to establish the…

This article discusses the nominalizer /-qa/ in Hopi, looking specifically at nominalizations in /-qa/ without head nouns, sentential complements in /-qa/, and relative clauses in /-qa/. (CLK)

An analysis of indirect object passives in English and their development from Late Old English and Early Middle English suggests that their existence is related to the development of double object constructions. As long as the dative and accusative cases had not merged, neither pronominal nor nominal indirect objects required a preposition;…

Points of similarity and contrast between English and Modern Standard Arabic in relativization are examined. It is concluded that while the relativization process is essentially the same in both languages, they differ with respect to the relative pronoun, the agreement of the relative pronoun with its antecedent, and the appearance of the…