Because dual language learners are the fastest--growing segment of the U.S. student population--and the majority speak Spanish as a first language--the new generation of SLPs must have comprehensive knowledge of how to work effectively with bilingual speakers. That's what they'll get in the second edition of this book, an ideal graduate-level text…

English and a small set of other languages have a wealth of available linguistic knowledge resources and annotated language data, but the great majority of the world's languages have little or none. This dissertation describes work which leverages the detailed and accurate morphosyntactic analyses available for English to improve analytical…

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca (SP, aka Soteapanec), a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, a typological overview of the language, a brief history of my fieldwork, and the…

This study investigates how "unknowing" story recipients (C. Goodwin, 1979) use different types of questions in order to actively participate in storytelling and collaboratively construct a story when a storyteller is relaying his or her past experience, by examining grammar, intonation, gaze, body movements, and sequence organization in Japanese…

The literature on grammatical skills in persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CCS) is very limited, and the need for more knowledge in this area is thus evident, in particular for speech and language therapists working with individuals with this syndrome. This case study report describes the syntactic skills of a 14-year-old Norwegian girl with CCS.…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are known to have impairments in various aspects of phonology, which have been claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments. However, "phonology" encompasses a wide range of skills, and little is known about whether these phonological impairments extend to…

In the information systems field there are numerous programming languages that can be used in specifying the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. In the literature it has been argued that a lack of pragmatic and semantic consideration decreases the effectiveness of such specifications. In other words, to simply understand the syntactic…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use their knowledge of complement syntax as a means of "hacking out" solutions to false belief tasks, despite lacking a representational theory of mind (ToM). Participants completed a "memory for complements" task, a measure of receptive vocabulary, and…

This is a study with descriptive hypothesis-testing design investigating the true nature of L2 grammatical proficiency via focusing on its component parts. It examines the performance of 60 female EFL learners between 19 and 30 years of age at 2 proficiency levels using 2 types of computerized Grammaticality Judgement tasks in different orders…

Despite many ELT experts' opinions that while teaching a foreign language one should not use the mother tongue in the classroom, new researches show that sparing use of the mother tongue can be effective for the L2 learners. It is true that the 6- year compulsory English education of the school graduates of Saudi Arabia is not quite up to the…

This paper investigates the acoustic properties of speech used by infant listeners to discover clauses in continuous speech. In a series of experiments using the Headturn Preference procedure, 6-month-old infants' use and weighting of prosodic cues in their segmentation of clauses in continuous speech was explored. The experiments sequentially…

This dissertation explores the robust confluence of syntactic and cultural factors involved in the structure and content of chengyu. It unpacks a number of structural tendencies in the data sample, and illuminates selected underlying cultural themes. The presence of syntactic and semantic parallelism within chengyu, as an expression of the…

The Tzeltal language is spoken in a mountainous region of southern Mexico by some 280,000 Mayan corn farmers. This paper focuses on landscape and place vocabulary in the Tzeltal municipio of Tenejapa, where speakers use an absolute system of spatial reckoning based on the overall uphill (southward)/downhill (northward) slope of the land. The paper…

By the age of three, typically developing children can draw conceptual distinctions between "kinds of individual" and "kinds of stuff" on the basis of syntactic structures. They differ from adults only in the extent to which syntactic knowledge can be over-ridden by semantic properties of the referent. However, the relative roles of syntax and…