Explores the question of the acquisition of tense and aspect and sheds new light on this question through fresh analytic categories. Examines the role of broader situation types in second language learners' development of tense-aspect morphology. (Author/VWL)

Presents an account of existential "there"-sentences in which the postverbal negative phrase (NP) is required to represent a "hearer-new" entity. The article identifies five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may occur in "there"-sentences. The restriction against definite NPs in "there"-sentences results from a mismatch in…

Explores effects of first-language verb-argument structure on English-as-a-Second-Language processing. Native Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Romance language speakers (all advanced English speakers) provided word-by-word reading times and gramaticality judgment data in self-paced reading tasks. Results suggest that reliable differences in parsing…

A study examined the process of grammaticalization in American Sign Language, examining basic principles and patterns and drawing parallels with oral language. More advanced stages of grammaticalization (involving fusion and affecting syntax) are examined in depth, leading to proposal of a temporal-ordering analysis to explain sequencing of verbal…

Examined whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predicted how college student speakers performed in recognition memory and similarity judgment tasks. Found no language effect in recognition memory after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding, nor in similarity judgments after non-linguistic…

Examined effect of word class (nouns vs. verbs) on second language pronunciation accuracy of Korean-English adult bilinguals whose age of arrival in the United States ranged from 6 to 23 years. Transcriptions of their productions of English indicated they were more accurate in pronouncing verbs than nouns and were more accurate in detecting…

Describes some stable syntactic features of Swazi English. Discusses, among others, the use of the modal auxiliary "must," the use of "as to," the conflation of the emphatic "do" with the simple past tense, and dangling modifiers. (Author/JL)

Identifies a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms and three Spanish verb forms used in Galician with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. Shows that this variation is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the acquisition of verb movement phenomena in the interlanguage of English native speakers learning French as a second language. Participants were given a grammaticality judgment task and production task. French native speakers' results go against certain theoretical predictions of negation and adverb placement in nonfinite contexts,…

Examines verbal auxiliary selection in the speech of French immersion students. Examines variation in auxiliary selection in the oral discourse to determine to what extent it resembles that of native speakers. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence from Inuktitut, a null subject language, on optional infinitive production in typically developing (TD) children and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Shows TD children learning Inuktitut did not go through an OI stage, while one child with SLI does. Implications are discussed for theories of continuity, the…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Previous investigations of the variable marking of past time by the L2 learner have given rise to a number of hypotheses which predict the patterns of acquisition and use of past time markers in interlanguage (IL). However, given the complicity between their predictions, it has been previously noted that hypotheses such as the aspect and discourse…

Purpose: This investigation examined the comprehension of third person singular /s/ in 30 African American English (AAE)-speaking children as a subject-number agreement marker on a comprehension task. Method: A comprehension task was presented to 30 typically developing AAE-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6. The children were randomly…

Event-related potentials were measured as subjects read sentences presented word by word. A small N400 and a robust P600 effect were elicited by verbs that assigned the thematic role of Agent to their preceding noun-phrase argument when this argument was inanimate in nature. The amplitude of the P600, but not the N400, was modulated by the…