This dissertation seeks to answer three loosely-related questions regarding ergativity. First, what is the nature of the morphological phenomena known as ERG=GEN and ERG=POSS? After providing a thorough description with ample data from a wide range of sources, a typological survey of 40 ergative languages concludes that together, they are a fairly…

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' "uncertainty" about those…

This study investigated the contribution of word recognition from speech (WRS), syntactic knowledge, metacognitive awareness, self-efficacy to L2 listening comprehension among 92 students in English department, UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang Indonesia. This study applied Multiple Regression. The instruments consisted of tests and questionnaires.…

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…

For languages to survive as complex cultural systems, they need to be learnable. According to traditional approaches, learning is made possible by constraining the degrees of freedom in advance of experience and by the construction of complex structure during development. This article explores a third contributor to complexity: namely, the extent…

The fact that English is an internationally intelligible language, and therefore its use in the educational institutions of most non-English speaking countries is stressed upon. This impresses upon us the need of ELT (English Language Teaching) as a second language in such countries. Same is the case with Gulf countries, especially Saudi-Arabia.…

We examined French-learning toddlers' sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs. Processing of this infrequent structure in the input (see Corpus Analyses) requires going beyond surface patterns of non-adjacent dependencies to…

It is widely believed that reading to preschool children promotes their language and literacy skills. Yet, whether early parent-child book reading is an index of generally rich linguistic input or a unique predictor of later outcomes remains unclear. To address this question, we asked whether naturally occurring parent-child book reading…

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns,…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent…

We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…