This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and…

This essay is an empirical account of English language use, across three continents, in 40 Tuning and analogous discipline-based statements of desired demonstrated competences and learning outcomes in higher education. It is primarily concerned with lexical and semantic matters, takes the perspective of the student as the primary reader and…

As learner corpora have presently become readily accessible, it is practicable to examine interlanguage errors and carry out error analysis (EA) on learner-generated texts. The data available in a learner corpus enable researchers to investigate authentic learner errors and their respective frequencies in terms of types and tokens as well as…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

This study investigated how frequency influenced acquisition of L2 English infinitive and gerund complements among L1 Thai learners. Participants were separated into low and high proficiency groups based on their CU-TEP scores. Each group consisted of 30 participants. Data were collected using the Word Selection Task (WST) and the Grammaticality…

Although millions of speakers of Spanish employ "voseo", the twentieth century did not see a single article published in "Hispania" that suggested incorporating instruction on "voseo" into the language classroom. In contrast, the twenty-first century has already seen three articles published in "Hispania"…

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar…

This study investigates the ERP components associated with the processing of words that are critical to generating and rejecting deductive conditional Modus Ponens arguments ("If P then Q; P//"Therefore, "Q"). The generation of a logical inference is investigated by placing a verb in the minor premise that matches the one used in the antecedent of…

Purpose: This study compared the diagnostic accuracy of a general grammaticality measure (i.e., percentage grammatical utterance; PGU) to 2 less comprehensive measures of grammaticality--a measure that excluded utterances without a subject and/or main verb (i.e., percentage sentence point; PSP) and a measure that looked only at verb tense errors…

A syntactic-semantic investigation of subjunctive and indicative "da"-complements in Serbian is conducted in this project. After a careful comparison of Serbian sentence constructions with "da"-complements to the equivalent sentence structures in languages of the Balkans as well as other Slavic languages, it is clearly…

We investigate the production of subject and object "who"- and "which"-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that…

Isleno Spanish speakers maintain few contexts firmly in the subjunctive (for example, adverbial clauses with the conjunctions "para que" and "antes que" and nominal clauses with "querer"), with most other semantic or syntactic categories optionally licensing the subjunctive. This study will outline the obligatory and optional uses of present and…

Purpose: The comprehension of tense/aspect morphology by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed via Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) to determine whether this population's difficulties with producing these morphemes extended to their comprehension. Method: Four-year-old participants were assessed twice, 4 months apart. They…

The current study aims to examine the use of chunks and the extent of repetition in Korean middle school English textbooks. Also, the number of chunks shared by three publishers is examined. To create the corpora, 9 textbooks from three publishers were filed and processed by Simple Concordance Program. The results showed that chunk expressions…