This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…

The adverbial phrase "a lo mejor" (at best) does not take the subjunctive, although other adverbial expressions of possibility may be followed by either indicative or subjunctive. Examines statements co-occurring with "a lo mejor" from the viewpoint of statement and mood, taking into account communicative discourse function. The study shows that…

Provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in "Interchange" (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a Second Language (ESL). A corpus analysis of "Interchange" suggests that ESL materials may underrepresent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty.…

A "hippocampal amnesiac" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading was or was not the primary goal. H.M produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without self-correction. Results support a theoretical…

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments,…

Readers construct at least two interrelated representations when they comprehend a text: (a) a representation of the explicit ideas in a text and the relations among them (i.e., a propositional representation) and (b) a representation of the context or situation to which a text refers (i.e., a discourse model). In a recent study, Long and Baynes…

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with…

This paper examines how future metadata capabilities could enable academic libraries to exploit information on the emerging Semantic Web in their library catalogues. Whereas current metadata architectures treat the Web as a simple means of interchanging bibliographic data that have been created by libraries, this paper suggests that academic…

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated…

Back-translation is typically used to verify semantic equivalence (SE) of a translated measure to the original scale. Although validity of the adapted scale depends fundamentally on SE, back-translation always involves subjective evaluations. This study developed "dual-language, split-half quantitative methods of verification to supplement…

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in…

In this experimental study, we focus on the following semantic universal: if a habitual clause reading, then generic pronominal subject; if an episodic clause reading, then specific pronominal subject. We argue that although this set of two conditionals is a universal property of all natural languages, English-speaking second-language (L2)…

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms ("some", "might", "or") (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou…

Using experimental data from adult and child non-native language acquirers (L2ers), this paper addresses "interface issues" in language acquisition in two different ways. First, it examines the acquisition of direct object scrambling in Dutch, a phenomenon which involves the interaction of at least two different modules of language, i.e., syntax…

This qualitative study investigated written discourse in the form of personal letters written by ten people with aphasia following stroke and ten people with cognitive-language disorder as a consequence of traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged writers. Personal letters perform the dual function of…