Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…

Recently, there has been considerable L2 research on interfaces between different modules of grammar (internal), such as syntax-semantics, or between grammar and other cognitive systems (external), such as semantics-pragmatics. Sorace's (2011) Interface Hypothesis proposes that L2 learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate…

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to provide a comprehensive description of complement-clause production in children with language impairment. Complement clauses were examined with respect to types of complement structure produced, verb use, and both semantic and syntactic accuracy. Method: A group of 17 children with language impairment…

The differential processing of nouns and verbs has been attributed to a combination of morphological, syntactic and semantic factors which are often intertwined with other general lexical properties. This study tested the noun-verb difference with Chinese disyllabic words controlled on various lexical parameters. As Chinese words are free from…

That there exists a group of biblical Hebrew verbs which appear in both transitive and intransitive grammatical constructions has long been recognized. However, explanations of this phenomenon among modern BH grammarians, especially regarding the grammatical status of the Object, have been unsatisfactorily vague. Many issues relevant to the BH…

Good and poor comprehenders exhibit different profiles of cognitive abilities, despite comparable decoding skills. Recent work suggests that executive functions, particularly cognitive flexibility, may underlie poor comprehenders' difficulties in childhood and adulthood. However, metalinguistic skills that enable readers to reflect on various…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Potawatomi, a critically endangered Algonquian language now only spoken as a first language by a handful of elders in northern Wisconsin. Throughout, the goal is to present an authoritative linguistic description of Potawatomi by drawing on direct elicitation, a corpus of new texts gathered in close…

Children acquire language in conversation. This is where they are exposed to the community language by more expert speakers. This exposure is effectively governed by adult reliance on pragmatic principles in conversation: Cooperation, Conventionality, and Contrast. All three play a central role in speakers' use of language for communication in…

The current study focuses on an e-learning platform called Furago designed to provide language instructors with exercises complementing activities already implemented in their classes. Its objective was to assess the impact the use of Furago could have on the listening skills of first-year Japanese university students. Statistical analyses that…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

This study investigates chiasmus as a stylistic device in ten metaphysical poems (five for John Donne and five for Henry Vaughan). It aims at showing how both, Donne and Vaughan, utilize chiasmus at the different linguistic levels as a stylistic device in their poetry. Thus, to achieve this aim, it is hypothesized that chiasmus as used by Donne…

In this dissertation, I investigate specificational copular clauses (Higgins 1973). My aim is to not only propose an analysis for how such specificational copular clauses are derived but also to use such constructions as a testing ground for evaluating and/ or revising different aspects of linguistic theory. The language I primarily use towards…

Four 5-year-old children with receptive language within normal limits and who required augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) received instruction in producing six different semantic--syntactic structures (three treatment and three generalization targets). Participants accessed single-meaning graphic symbols using an AAC app on an iPad…

Since database conceptual modeling is a complex cognitive activity, finding an appropriate pedagogy to deliver the topic to novice database designers is a challenge for Information Systems (IS) educators. The four-level TSSL model that is known in the area of human-computer interactions (HCI) is used to explain and demonstrate how instructional…

This study was designed to examine the strength of question types to obligate complete responses from children, and the effect of age and play context. Participants were typically developing children (mean ages 2;8, 3;4 and 4;7), who engaged in play with three speech-language pathologists in play contexts. Questions posed to the children were…