This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that…

Lessons designed to teach reading and listening typically concentrate on the use of higher-level skills and strategies, such as predicting, scanning, inferencing, understanding text structure, or activating background knowledge. Given that these normal communication skills are already available to students for mother-tongue use, they should…

Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to…

Purpose: Language is a multidimensional construct from prior to the beginning of formal schooling to near the end of elementary school. The primary goals of this study were to identify the dimensionality of language and to determine whether this dimensionality was consistent in children with typical language development from preschool through 5th…

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches…

Inspired by Syrett (2013), three experiments explored children's ability to distinguish "attributives" (e.g., "three-pound strawberries," where MPs as adjectives signal reference to attributes) versus "pseudopartitives" (e.g., "three pounds of strawberries," where MPs combine with "of" to signal…

Background: According to the linguistic determinism approach, knowledge of sentential complements such as: "John says that the earth" is flat plays a crucial role in theory of mind (ToM) development by providing a means to represent explicitly people's mental attitudes and beliefs. This approach predicts that mastery of complements…

Do adults learn the same syntactic second language (L2) form explicitly and implicitly simultaneously during meaning-based exposure, and does the type of learning (explicit and/or implicit) affect subsequent performance. In this study, 81 anglophones completed comprehension tasks providing incidental exposure to a semi-artificial language (English…

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…

The study abroad (SA) experience is often viewed as an opportunity to gain proficiency in a foreign language due to immersion in the target language and culture. Nevertheless, the increased amount of research conducted on SA over the last two decades indicates that it does not necessarily lead to gains in all areas (Collentine & Freed, 2004;…

This is a study of processes of structural and functional diversification of the uses of three cognate verbs across the Indo-Iranian language family: "do/make", "be/become", and "give". First, this study identifies over sixty distinct construction types in which these verbs are used, including complex predicate…

This dissertation presents the results of a typological study that investigated the global distribution of antipassive constructions, as well as the distribution of the relevant antipassiverelated features. The sample includes data from 445 languages, which represent 144 language families and isolates. This larger study is informed by an in-depth…

Learning a foreign language for those who have their first and second language often puts learners in imperfection mastery such as irrelevant lexical choice, and source cultural bounds language utterances. Knowing the concepts merely cannot guarantee the process of avoiding mistakes or errors that learners have. There has been an amount of…

Many people from Turkey emigrated to European countries as a result of the bilateral agreements signed between Turkey and related countries after the 1950s. The temporary travels to these countries left their place to permanent settlements, and the Turkish children living there were faced with the danger of alienation from their mother tongue and…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…