Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first…

In Spanish, it is most commonly claimed that constituents in narrow presentational focus appear rightmost, where they also get main stress (1a), while stress in situ (1b) is infelicitous. (1) [Context: Who bought a car?]. a. Compró un carro mi [mamá][subscript F]. bought a car my mom. b. Mi [mamá ][subscript F] compró un carro. However, some…

This thesis aims to examine the development of morphosyntax with longitudinal English production from Diany, a Mandarin-speaking child, starting from the second week Diany arrived in the U.S.A. (age 4;9). The study is particularly interested in whether Diany's acquisition of verbal morphemes and verb movement supports relevant hypotheses in the…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

The Indo-European language family contains many "small words" with various adverbial meanings and functions, including preverbs. The term "preverb" is used to label any of a variety of modifying morphemes that form a close semantic unit with a verb, including both words and prefixes (Booij and Kemenade 2003). Some Indo-European languages not only…

The aim of this article is to give an up-to-date picture of study of the role of the background languages (the first language, L1, and the second language, L2) in third language (L3) acquisition, mainly in the two areas of vocabulary and syntax. These seem to be the two linguistic levels on which there has so far been most research concerning…

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends…

This study provides an empirical examination of how American learners of German accomplish the social action of requesting in L2 conversation, demonstrating how L2 learners use their linguistic and interactional resources to orient to preference structure in their talk. The data illustrate the sequential contingencies surrounding requests and…

In the present study we analyzed the processing of grammatically anomalous sentences like "*The famous dancer were nervously preparing herself/themselves to face the crowd.", which contains two anomalies, one early and one late. We investigated how processing of the later anomaly (at the pronoun "herself" or…

Several studies on L3 lexicon, and recently also some on L3 syntax, have convincingly shown a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true L2 and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Some studies even indicate that L2 takes on a stronger role than L1 in the initial state of L3 syntax (e.g. Bardel and Falk, 2007; Rothman and Cabrelli…

Language interference is one of the factors that affect language learning by many learners of second and third languages. In Zambia, the impact of language interference on the learners of French requires closer attention. Our literature review shows that few studies have looked at the impact of interference from Zambian languages on the learners…

Cyclic Linearization is adopted to account for the island repair of Sluicing in English. The extraction of wh-phrase out of certain islands undergoes non-successive-cyclic movement, which yields conflicting ordering statements. The derivation can be rescued by deleting all ordering statements in IP, including those conflicting ones. Two arguments…

Linguistic research on the Mayan languages up to the mid 1980s was almost exclusively descriptive in nature. At best, analyses were speculative and pre-theoretical. Since then, research based on contemporary theories of syntax have begun to emerge. In adopting the formal architecture of OT-LFG, I argue that my dissertation can be included amongst…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

It has been proposed that external interfaces are vulnerable to residue optionality, whereas pure syntax and internal interfaces are acquirable in second language (L2) acquisition (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006). The proposal was tested in this article through the interpretation of overt and null embedded arguments in L2 Chinese…