The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

There is a critical need, according to national policy statements in the United States, to integrate information and communication technologies into instruction, and yet research about the effect of such integration on the literacy learning of at-risk populations is scant. In addition, barriers exist that prevent teachers from realizing the goal…

This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features that form ECs; namely, existential "there," the copula, definiteness, and agreement for English and existential "fii," definiteness,…

The dissertation examines the resultatives in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Mandarin) and Taiwanese Southern Min (henceforth Taiwanese), a notoriously difficult construction that has drawn extensive attention in the literature. With a microparametric approach, I offer a syntactic analysis for two kinds of resultatives, phrasal resultatives and…

This paper is a very preliminary attempt to look at how languages encode information. Different languages use different linguistic devices. Indian languages encode information morphologically or lexically. This provides flexibility in their word order. English, on the other hand, uses position for encoding information which results in a relatively…

Given the amount of visual information in a scene, how do speakers determine what to talk about first? One hypothesis is that speakers start talking about what has attentional priority, while another is that speakers first extract the scene gist, using the obtained relational information to generate a rudimentary sentence plan before retrieving…

The present project is a case study of 68 Kuwaiti children (aged between 4 and 8) who acted out their interpretation of verbal stimuli involving three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic Subject Verb Object (SVO), Verb Subject Object (VSO) and Topic-Comment (T-C) by using a set of props. The purpose is to investigate the way Kuwaiti children comprehend…

This study investigates the role of mental simulation in message formulation and grammatical encoding in two typologically distinct languages, English and Japanese. It examines relationships among physical motion, mental simulation, and sentence production, following the claims of Perceptual Symbol Systems (Barsalou, 1999) that people understand…

The acquisition of word order has been one of the central issues in the study of child language. One striking finding from the detailed investigation of various child languages is that from the earliest observable stages, children are highly sensitive to the basic word order of their target language. However, the evidence so far comes mainly from…

The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the ongoing debate about the use of lexical bundles by first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of English. The study consists of two experiments that examined whether L1 and L2 English speakers displayed any knowledge of lexical bundles as holistic units and whether their knowledge was…

We investigated the processing of violations of the verb position in Dutch, in a group of healthy subjects, by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) through electroencephalography (EEG). In Dutch, the base position of the verb is clause final, but in matrix clauses, the finite verb is in second position, a construction known as "Verb Second".…

The present study reports the findings of an experiment on the effects of explicit information on the learning of German case markings. Fifty-nine learners of first- and second-year German received computer-based processing instruction on German accusative case marking and word order. These learners were divided into two groups: one received…

For the recent discussions on the status of English in the global context and its implication for English language teaching (Canagarajah, 2006; Jenkins, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Kachru, 1985, 1991, 1992a, 1992b; Modiano, 1999a, 1999b; Rajagopalan, 2004), some ELT researchers (Lee, 2007; Park, 2006, 2007) have conducted a full-scaled documentation…

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax-semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…