Previous research on finiteness has been dominated by the studies in tensed languages, e.g. English. Consequently, finiteness has been identified with tense. The traditional definition influences the morphological, semantic, and syntactic characterization of finiteness which has also been equated with tense and its realization. The present study…

This study investigated the use of cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. In Study 1, conversational samples from 23 children with SLI (M = 6;2), 24 age-matched TD children (M = 6;2) and 21 vocabulary-matched TD children (M = 4;9) were…

This cross-sectional study attempted to determine whether the English negation errors made by the University of Jordan's students were similar to the English negation errors proposed by Klima and Bellugi (1966), or influenced by the Arabic syntactic structures of negative sentences. Data of negative structures were gathered, and error counts were…

This paper examines the connection between translation and narratives of history, with particular attention to Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and its Spanish version, "La otra historia de los Estados Unidos". It is argued that translation interacts with history in many ways: translation is fundamental to history and, in…

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age = 4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic…

The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break,…

Previous research regarding the neural basis of semantic composition has relied heavily on violation paradigms, which often compare implausible sentences that violate world knowledge to plausible sentences that do not violate world knowledge. This comparison is problematic as it may involve extralinguistic operations such as contextual repair and…

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process, but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic, and phonological abilities. The present article reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of…

Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject, object, and indirect object relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 8 years, 6 months (3;5-8;6). The children were asked…

The role of working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has received considerable interest, but little work has investigated how sentence production relies on memory mechanisms. Three experiments investigated speakers' tendency to produce syntactic structures that allow for early production of material that is accessible in memory. In Experiment…

Although language experience is a key factor in successful foreign language (FL) learning, many FL learners fail to achieve performance levels that were predicted on the basis of their FL experience. This retrospective study investigated early cognitive and linguistic correlates of learning English as a foreign language (FL) in a group of…

This study examined the effects of explicit instruction on the development of pragmatic competence in L2 English. The study is based on Taguchi's (2012) study conducted in an English-medium university in Japan, which revealed patterns of change in Japanese EFL students' production of requests in high- and low-imposition situations. Students showed…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

The goal of this study was to explore English instructors' application of accommodation strategies under English-Mediated Instruction (EMI) in English as a lingua franca context of higher education in Taiwan. English instructors' verbal discourses with regard to various types of strategies during instruction were documented and examined. The…