The current study investigates Spanish children's variation between the standard and non-standard forms for second person singular preterit --s ("caiste" [approximately equal to] "caístes"). All second person singular preterit forms were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 78 children in Spain and analyzed for the effects…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of mind mapping on Ethiopian secondary school students' English collocation learning. The study specifically tried to check the effectiveness of mind mapping on adjective-preposition and verb-noun combination collocations. A sample of 110 grade 12 students who were learning in two sections…

Purpose: This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed similar sensitivity to verb bias information during real-time sentence processing as typically developing (TD) peers. Method: Seventeen college students with DLD and 16 TD college students participated in a mouse-tracking experiment that…

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the…

Our visual experience is surprisingly rich: We do not only see low-level properties such as colors or contours; we also see events, or what is happening. Within linguistics, the examination of how we talk about events suggests that relatively abstract elements exist in the mind which pertain to the relational structure of events, including general…

Preschoolers who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) generally do not acquire grammatical forms at the same ages or rates of children who are not DHH. The purpose of this study was to investigate treatment intensity using a variation of enhanced conversational recast (Encinas & Plante [2016]. Feasibility of a recasting and auditory bombardment…

Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

Students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are expected to master the fundamental of grammar so they can produce good essays. However, despite having learned English at the secondary or university level, students tend to make many grammatical errors in their writing. This study presents the grammatical errors made by college EFL students in…

We investigated whether children's inhibitory control (IC) is associated with their ability to produce irregular past tense verb forms as well as learn from corrective feedback following overregularization errors. Forty-eight 3;6 to 4;5 year old children were tested on the irregular past tense and provided with adult corrective input via models of…

Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a…

This mixed-methods study investigated the effectiveness of multimedia instruction for phrasal-verb education with community-college English as a second-language learners (ESL) in Northern California. Previous researchers have found that ESL learners have difficulties and barriers in learning phrasal verbs, and other researchers have found that how…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a predictive model of Spanish heritage grammars by applying recent advancements in machine learning to ferret out factors and covariates that give rise to the Spanish subjunctive. Given that "[p]redictive models would entail that we have a far better understanding of the various…