The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic…

Grammar in natural interaction is an emergent, dynamic and adaptive system that is consistently subject to change. It is understood as a collection of open multiple subsystems, each of which is activated as the language users recurrently participate in a particular linguistic, interactional and social activity. When a certain linguistic form or…

The perfective marker V-"le" is claimed to be one of the most problematic items in the acquisition of L2 Chinese, perhaps because no unified and comprehensive treatment of it exists in the literature. Although much has been written on this topic, the semantic and pragmatic functions of V-"le" have remained elusive. While linguists and grammarians…

This study presents the grammar of the Lewotobi dialect of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language spoken in the eastern part of Flores Island and neighboring islands of Indonesia. Lamaholot belongs to the Central Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of Austronesian, within which it is in a subgroup with the languages of Timor and Roti. The number of speakers…

This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., "le/les garcons lit/lisent" "the boy(s) read(s)") where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further…

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each…

Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During an 1.5 Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like "Africa is arid"),…

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals' production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek-English and English-Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated…

We show that comprehenders' expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line…

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

Purpose: This review introduces emergentism, which is a leading theory of language development that states that language ability is the product of interactions between the child's language environment and his or her learning capabilities. The review suggests ways in which emergentism provides a theoretical rationale for interventions that are…

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it…

This research studied the use of modals in argumentative written tasks by Form 5 Malaysian secondary school ESL students. The aim of this study was to examine the use of English modals at the syntactic level from data presented in the MCSAW Corpus. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis aided by…

Introduction: Having spent twenty years of business and professional development from the emergence of speech and hearing teacher traveling, it seems appropriate to reflect on the role he has been playing this figure in order to apprehend the things considered to improve the approach to adopt towards to promote the quality of its educational…

In this exploratory study of subtractive bilingualism in Spanish-English bilingual children, we present evidence that crosslinguistic influence has a selective effect on heritage first language loss. Differences in feature strength between English and Spanish in interrogative and negative polarity item (NPI) sentences seem to affect the…