Languages vary according to which morphosyntactic forms of embedding are present in the grammar as well as to which of these forms allow recursive embedding. The present study examines how German-speaking children discover which forms of embedding are recursive. In German, possessive modifiers are expressed by several structural options (i.e.,…

The purpose of the article was to analyze the psychological and pedagogical conditions of word-formation skills for Kazakh-speaking preschool children with speech disorders on the basis of learning theories and contemporary approaches. To achieve the set aim, we have studied psychophysiological peculiarities of preschool children with speech…

This study explored the role of word knowledge dimensions in second language (L2) word-meaning inference. College-level L2 learners (N = 121) participated in this study and completed a series of word knowledge tests including vocabulary size, word associates, morpheme-form knowledge, morpheme-meaning knowledge, morpheme discrimination, and…

Most common words in English have multiple different meanings, but relatively little is known about why children grasp some meanings better than others. This study aimed to examine how variables at the child-level, wordform-level, and meaning-level impact knowledge of words with multiple meanings. In this study, 174 children aged 5- to 9-years-old…

It is assumed by many teachers and materials writers that it is important to teach at all levels the forms and meanings of derivational prefixes and suffixes, as an important aid to learning new words in English. However, corpus evidence suggests that knowledge of the meanings of such components occurring within the most common 5,000 words in…

Vocabulary learning strategies are essential in vocabulary acquisition and one particularly important strategy is word part strategy. This quasi-experimental research attempted to investigate the effects of word part strategy instruction on vocabulary knowledge among primary school students in a Thai EFL context. It also sought to explore primary…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

This study applies audio-assisted reading (AAR), a technique that provides multimedia input, to encourage incidental learning of the present perfect tense. The decision to choose this tense was informed by previous studies, which have shown that its multifunctional nature presents EFL learners with considerable challenges. Thirty-four Iranian EFL…

Purpose: This study investigated methodological and theoretical aspects of using mean length of utterance (MLU) and its alternatives in cross-linguistic research and, in particular, its applicability to Russian--a language with a rich system of grammatical and derivational morphemes. Method: We collected audio recordings of spontaneous speech…

There has been a growing interest in the rhetorical move structure of research articles (RAs). Research studies reveal that articles written by native and nonnative English speakers show some similarities and differences in their rhetorical structure and linguistic features across disciplines. This study was therefore undertaken to investigate the…

Morphologically marked case is in Arabic a feature exclusive to the variety of Standard Arabic, with no parallel in the spoken varieties, and it is orthographically marked only on some word classes in specific grammatical situations. In this study we test the hypothesis that readers of Arabic do not parse sentences for case and that…

This article proposes a novel account for the overuse of free morphemes and underuse of bound morphemes in English as a second language (L2) based on the framework of Distributed Morphology. It will be argued that an Economy Principle 'Do everything in Narrow Syntax (DENS)' operates in the L2 learner's computational system. Consequently,…

We investigated whether children's inhibitory control (IC) is associated with their ability to produce irregular past tense verb forms as well as learn from corrective feedback following overregularization errors. Forty-eight 3;6 to 4;5 year old children were tested on the irregular past tense and provided with adult corrective input via models of…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

This study examines the effect of the lexical aspect on the use of the English simple past temporal morphology by Saudi learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), with a particular reference to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH). Data were gathered from 54 Saudi undergraduate EFL learners from five levels (L3-L7), using a production task and a…