An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and…

Background: Speech and language researchers study phonological acquisition and evaluate the errors that children make to understand this complex process. This information provides clinicians with a scientific reference for better assessment and intervention services to children with articulation/phonological disorders. Urdu is a language spoken by…

The accurate identification of likely segmental pronunciation errors produced by nonnative speakers of English is a longstanding goal in pronunciation teaching. Most lists of pronunciation errors for speakers of a particular first language (L1) are based on the experience of expert linguists or teachers of English as a second language (ESL) and…

We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

The article discusses the potential of combining learner corpus research with experimental studies in order to fine-tune the understanding of learner language development. It illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological approaches with data from an ongoing study of the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by French…

This study aims at providing a comprehensive account of the types of errors produced by Arab students of English as a second language based on a multiple classificatory taxonomy developed for this purpose. The corpus providing the database for the study consists of three parts: (i) short tape-recorded interviews, (ii) translated sentences and…

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,…

English has become the "lingua franca" of international exchanges. This is reflected in sociolinguistic studies of linguistic landscape (LL) which tackle the coexistence of English with local languages (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Cenoz & Gorter, 2006; Edelman, 2006), on occasion oppressed (e.g. Nino-Murcia, 2003). However, there is little…

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in…