A key concern for writers is the creation of cohesion in a text, and writers are told by style manuals to avoid the use of demonstratives ("this," "that," "these," "those") as pronouns in order to maintain cohesion. However, previous corpus-based investigations have already revealed that authors of academic texts use demonstratives as both…

This study examined adult English native speakers' processing of sentences in which pronominal case marking conflicts with word order. Previous research has shown that English speakers rely heavily on word order for assigning case roles during sentence interpretation. However, in terms of cue reliability measures, we should expect English…

This article presents the results of a study that investigated readers' perceptions of tone formality in online text passages. The study found that readers perceived text passages to be less formal when they contained personal pronouns, active voice verbs, informal punctuation, or verb contractions. The study reveals that professional…

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagne & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of…

In two experiments, one hundred ninety-two 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults heard a novel word for a target object and then were asked to extend the label to one of two test objects, one matching in shape-based object category (the shape match) and the other matching in a property other than shape (the property match). We independently…

We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6-17) from the…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

This thesis is a comprehensive study of lexical and clause-linkage properties of converbs in an underdescribed language, Sakha (aka Yakut). Following Haspelmath (1995b) a converb is defined as a non-finite verb form which mainly indicates an adverbial subordination. Converbs are attested in diverse languages of the world, but are used extensively…

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a "mixed" language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media…

The claim that the words "for," "and," "nor," "but," "or," "yet," and "so" (FANBOYS) constitute a complete list of English coordinating conjunctions is examined though syntactic analysis and found wanting. This analysis is presented as an illustration of the need for teachers constantly to question the choice of material that we present to our…

Before the developmental trajectory, outcomes, and related interventions of gratitude can be accurately and confidently studied among the youth, researchers must ensure that they have psychometrically sound measures of gratitude that are suitable for this population. Thus, considering that no known scales were specifically designed to measure…

The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that…

Children with language difficulties often omit verbs and grammatical elements and fail to complete sentences. Bryan (1997) described "colourful semantics", a therapy she used to treat a 5-year-old boy. The therapy uses colour coding to highlight the predicate argument structure of sentences. This study further tested the therapy's…

The position of antecedent strategy (Carminati, 2002) claims that speakers of null-subject languages prefer to resolve intrasentential anaphora by linking pro to an antecedent in the specifier of the inflection phrase and the overt pronoun to an antecedent lower in the clause. The present study has two aims: (a) to determine whether adult early…