Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…

Purpose: Music could be a challenger for mathematics and a potential candidate for the title "The Universal Language." This paper aims to discuss the primary objectives of engaging with music, including the therapeutic benefits. Similarities, between mathematics and music and how studying one might enhance one's abilities of the other…

This study investigated the acquisition of English "control" and "raising" ("over Experiencer") constructions with three groups of Thai EFL learners (lower intermediate, intermediate, and advanced). Thai and English, with respect to "control," commonly have PRO and infinitive markers, but Thai does not…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against…

Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic, and one semi-official language, English. Within this multilingual environment, the national English curriculum relates to all learners as one homogenous population. There are no specific directives regarding the linguistic needs of diverse language backgrounds. Studies of literacy acquisition…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

Purpose: Universal language can be viewed as a conjectural or antique dialogue that is understood by a great deal, if not all, of the world's population. In this paper, a sound argument is presented that mathematical language exudes characteristics of worldwide understanding. The purpose of this paper is to explore mathematical language as a tool…

Providing evidence for the universal tendencies of patterns in the world's languages can be difficult, as it is impossible to sample all possible languages, and linguistic samples are subject to interpretation. However, experimental techniques, such as artificial grammar learning paradigms, make it possible to uncover the psychological reality of…

Languages are transmitted from person to person and generation to generation via a process of iterated learning: people learn a language from other people who once learned that language themselves. We analyze the consequences of iterated learning for learning algorithms based on the principles of Bayesian inference, assuming that learners compute…

Three studies comparing the respective roles of interlanguage universals and natural language transfer in determining learners' judgments of grammaticality used college students of French in their second, third, and fourth semesters as subjects. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to both grammatical and four types of ungrammatical…

Reports on an experiment in which high school and college students were tested to ascertain: (1) to what extent students learning French as a foreign language treat sentences with negative elements as native French speakers do and (2) to what extent students perform similarly in French and English. Offers two suggestions for teaching French…

It has been argued that extended exposure to naturalistic input provides L2 learners with more of an opportunity to converge of target morphosyntactic competence as compared to classroom-only environments, given that the former provide more positive evidence of less salient linguistic properties than the latter (e.g., Isabelli 2004). Implicitly,…