The system of second person singular forms of address (2PS) in Medellín, Colombia is tripartite consisting of "tú, vos," and "usted," while also including the existence of a dual "usted." The current study compares usage of the intimate "usted" versus the distant "usted" with data from an oral…

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers…

This study examines nominal derivational affixes in a multilingual practice in the Philippines involving Hokkien, Tagalog, and English called Lánnang-uè. A feature of this practice is the systematic combination of affixes and roots (henceforth, 'system'). Certain morphological combinations (e.g. Tagalog prefixes + English root) are used frequently…

The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals' intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact…

Concordancer tools have been used to help students learn aspects of written English by engaging them to access, examine, and analyze language examples in a corpus. Nonetheless, their efficacy remains uncertain when compared to other tools. This study compared a concordancer tool to Grammarly, QuillBot, Google search, online dictionaries, and…

The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their…

Commercial advertisements in Arabic-speaking regions tend to alternate between dialectal Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, but it is not yet clear whether language variety has any impact on listener's lexical recall. Insight into this issue should help enterprises design their commercial advertisements in a linguistically intelligent manner. This…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

This study examines the role of language proficiency and other individual factors (attitudes, input) in the acquisition of language-specific [ð] and dialect-specific [Ø] allophones of Spanish intervocalic /d/ in the /ado/ context by L2 and heritage Spanish speakers during a short-term study abroad in Sevilla, Spain. Twenty L2-intermediate, 10…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

This dissertation centers on the study of Kaqchikel word associations and the social variation that exists within them. Theoretical and methodological considerations for this project stem from the fields of psycholinguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. Together, these form an approach that fits within a blossoming…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…