There has been considerable research that investigates whether reflexives in interlanguage grammars (ILGs) are constrained by Principle A of the Binding Theory. These earlier studies focused on the role of sentence type, including both finite and non-finite test sentences; they did not examine the role of antecedent type, namely distinguishing…

Patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy from hippocampal origin and patients with unilateral surgical excision of an epileptic focus located in the medial temporal lobe were compared to healthy controls on a version of the Autobiographical Interview (AI) adapted to assess memory for event-specific and generic personal episodes. For both…

This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N = 24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5-3 ; 8) and older (N = 24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6-6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them…

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by…

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns…

Foreign language learning contrasts with native language development in two key respects: It is unreliable and it is nonconvergent. At the same time, it is clear that foreign languages are languages. The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH) was introduced as a way to account for the general characteristics of foreign language learning. The FDH…

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the…

Relative clauses have been implicated alternately as a strength and a weakness in the language of people with Williams Syndrome (WS). To clarify the facts, an elicited production test was administered to 10 people with WS (age 10-16 years), 10 typically developing children (age 4-7 years), and 12 typically developing adults. Nearly every WS…

In this paper, we report on the process of developing and validating a questionnaire to explore second language learners' preferences for two types of form-focused instruction (FFI): isolated and integrated FFI. Three types of evidence regarding the validity of the questionnaire were collected: content, reliability and construct. Content validity…

This study investigates the effects of three types of production activities on uptake (operationalized as correct suppliance of the target structure during the treatment) and acquisition of negative adverbs in English. It also investigates the relationship between uptake and acquisition. The three production activities included a dictation, an…

This article examines noun-drop constructions in French-speaking children. French being intermediate between English (which rarely allows noun-drop) and Spanish (which freely allows it) with respect to the richness of their respective morphological systems, it provides a fertile testing ground for various agreement-based analyses of noun-drop. We…

It is now generally agreed that some form of focus on the target code is necessary in adult L2 instruction. One question that remains to be answered is whether all aspects of L2 grammar are equally amenable to pedagogic intervention. A number of researchers have examined the effectiveness of instruction with regard to simple vs. difficult grammar…

Strengths and weaknesses of generative grammar are examined by an apologist for the traditionalists. Criticism is directed toward difficulties encountered by the layman in comprehending texts on linguistic theories, linguists' use of jargon and pet formulas, and unwieldy amounts of terminology constantly being developed. Special attention is…

This article argues that morphosemantic sets are a consequence of general properties of language structure. Thus the sets serve as a framework for advancing the study of motivation as a functional feature of language use. (Author/NCR)