This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and "ne" deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students'…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

Although it is a core component of a language user's overall linguistic competence, vocabulary has traditionally not received the kind of attention it deserved, being usually lumped with other kinds of competence till 1980s and 1990s when researchers started focusing on it with great interest. The present paper discusses what the notion of lexical…

Substantial biliteracy research on two alphabetic languages has indicated that, once it is fostered in the first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading. It is still unclear, however, whether L1 metalinguistic awareness transfers in the same manner across typologically…

Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…

Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given…

Students at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) are required to study a foreign language. In order to place students into appropriate language courses, especially less commonly taught languages defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), effective language placement policies are essential. The author…

Language generativity can be described as the ability to produce sentences never before said, and to understand sentences never before heard. One process often cited as underlying language generativity is response generalization. However, though the latter seems to promise a technical understanding of the former at a process level, an…

This article is a report on an investigation of quoting strategies in English, an investigation that is part of a longer-term research programme exploring clauses of "saying" and their quoted and reported content as direct and indirect speech by members of the SAL (Systemics Across Languages) Group. Here the focus is on how quotes are…

The -"s" genitives of English and Swedish play an important role in grammaticalization theory, as they are often used as counterexamples to the main tenet of that theory, viz. that grammatical change is unidirectional. In this paper I look at the emergence of the -"s" genitive in Danish, hoping that it may shed some new light on the evolution of…

This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners.…

A major open question in natural language research is the role of communicative efficiency in the origin and on-line processing of language structures. Here, we use word pairs like "chimp/chimpanzee", which differ in length but have nearly identical meanings, to investigate the communicative properties of lexical systems and the communicative…