The current work uses memory errors to examine the mental representation of verb-particle constructions (VPCs; e.g., "make up" the story, "cut up the meat"). Some evidence suggests that VPCs are represented by a cline in which the relationship between the VPC and its component elements ranges from highly transparent ("cut…

This study analyzed the grammatical control of verbs exercised by 145 monolingual English and Generation 1.5 bilingual developmental writers in narrative essays using quantitative and qualitative methods. Generation 1.5 students made more errors than their monolingual peers in each category investigated, albeit in only 2 categories was the…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

This article examines the acquisition of embedded verb placement in Swedish children, focusing on Neg-V and V-Neg order. It is proposed that a principle of economy of movement creates an overuse of V-Neg order in embedded clauses and that the low frequency of the target-consistent Neg-V order in child-directed speech obstructs children from…

This research paper aims to explore the usage of the English Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense Verb, using corpus based method among Malaysian form 4 and form 5 students. This study is conducted by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense verb in students' compositions from the MCSAW corpus…

The current research investigated the acquisition of the copula "be" in Present Simple Tense (PST) in English by native speakers of Russian. The aim of the study was to determine whether or not Russian students with different levels of English proficiency would encounter any problems while using the copula "be" in PST in English. The study also…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

The problem. The purpose of this study is to investigate positive and negative cross-linguistic transfer on EFL learners' phraseological competence in collocations and its relationship to learners' linguistic proficiency. Method. A quantitative study was conducted. Two instruments, multiple choice test and grammaticality judgment test, were…

In this study we tracked the development of the "passe compose" in second-language learners of French whose first language is English. Although the "passe compose" is a highly used tense among native speakers of French and it appears to present particular difficulty for first-language English speakers, its second-language development has been…

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important part in second language learning, especially at intermediate-advanced levels, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. The present study examines ESL learners' use of verb-noun collocations, such as "take notes," "place an…