To acquire language, learners have to map the language onto the environment, but languages vary as to how much information they include to constrain how a sentence relates to the world. We investigated the conditions under which information within the language and the environment is combined for learning. In a cross-situational artificial language…

The article focuses on a current issue in modern linguistics: linguistic consciousness. Linguistic consciousness refers to the outcomes of mental activity, perception and assimilation of information verbalized by means of the national language. Theoretical issues with the functioning of the term of "linguistic consciousness" in…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

Existing research on second language (L2) pronoun resolution has not yet looked at immediate and cumulative priming effects. By using a sentence comprehension task, the present study aims at priming dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns. We test a group of native speakers and a group of intermediate-proficiency L2 learners of…

Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro…

Does language development drive language change? A common account of language change attributes the regularity of certain patterns to children's learning biases. The present study examines these predictions for change-in-progress in the use of "must" in Toronto English. Historically, modal verbs like "must" start with root…

Albeit the research into Arabic slang has been extensively explored, little empirical evidence addresses the use of Arabic slang in the educational context. This study therefore examines the use of Arabic slang among students in one Islamic higher education in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. It applies an interpretative case study design. The…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

The phenomenon of regularization -- learners imposing systematicity on inconsistent variation in language input -- is complex. Studies show that children are more likely to regularize than adults, but adults will also regularize under certain circumstances. Exactly why we see the pattern of behaviour that we do is not well understood, however.…

In much previous research, language listeners were found to perform differently when listening to a second language (L2) spoken in foreign/native accents. Influential factors have not been ascertained. This study aimed to gain new insights into this issue. 82 Mandarin speakers of different L2 (English) proficiency and different degrees of…

This study examines heritage speakers' knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language varieties, including Colloquial Arabic (QA), on SA acquisition. To this end, the study…