Tested the predictions of three major hypotheses of relative clause acquisition in second language acquisition: the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH) and the SO Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH). Analyses of data collected from 61 learners of English as a Second Language in three different elicitation…

A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)

Investigates the use of preposition and subject with the infinitive, a construction not usually mentioned in Spanish grammar books. This construction is as commonplace in some regions as it is unacceptable in others, a situation giving rise to controversy. Some linguists believe that this construction is more prevalent among less-educated people.…

Reports a reanalysis of the data on surface and deep anaphors reported by Tanenhaus and Carlson and two experiments based on the reanalysis. The parallelism effects for deep anaphors were eliminated following short passives but not full passives. The results support the claim that deep and surface anaphors access different types of…

Examines four kinds of language learning-related behaviors (LLRBs) in the home conversations of 6 English children studied for 6 months from age 2.6 years. The role of LLRBs in frequency and range and in the frequency of grammatical productions during spontaneous revisions is addressed. (44 references) (GLR)

A typology for analyzing grammatical errors in student-written German compositions is presented and approaches to providing helpful error messages to student users of a parser-based writing aid are discussed. (19 references) (Author/LB)

Explores the acquisition process of relative clauses in Japanese and Korean. Examines the issue of whether Korean "kes" and Japanese "no" found in Korean and Japanese relative clauses are each a complementizer or a head noun.(Author/VWL)

This study used three experiments to study whether infant-directed (ID) or adult-directed (AD) speech facilitated the learning of Chinese vocabulary by adults whose native language was English and who had had no prior knowledge of Chinese. Results indicate that ID speech may play a pivotal role in early lexical acquisition. (51 references)…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

This article describes an investigation based on a corpus of original and redrafted versions of extracts from reflective narratives by 15-year-old secondary school students in the UK. It builds on the established research on sentence combining with respect to students' writing development. The findings are discussed in relation to the use of…

This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. *"Le tigre va le…

Testing of deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language suggests that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate good from poor deaf readers, but rather a processing deficit may underlie poor readers' comprehension difficulties. (Author/CB)

The potential of online language learning has received much attention recently. This paper reports the design of an online writing system featuring learning support for non-native students during their writing process. The central premise is that in the online writing situation, students are in great need of writing aids. The proposed system…

Microelectrode recordings of human sensori-motor subthalamic neuronal activity during spoken sentence and syllable-repetition tasks provided an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between changes in neuronal activities and specific aspects of these vocal behaviors. Observed patterns of neuronal activity included a build up of activity in…

Assuming the relevance of the linear precedence to the scope interpretation of adult Mandarin, this study investigated the development of this principle in Mandarin-speaking children, with a view to providing a basis for further study of parametric variation. Three kinds of sentences were examined, all of which contained mutually commanding…