Are subjects produced differently based on the transitivity of the clause they are embedded in? Based on data from a narrative reading experiment, it is shown that transitive subjects are produced with a lower f0 than intransitive subjects and that this difference is statistically significant (p less than 0.05). It is suggested that the purpose…

This paper examines the modification of nominal compounds by attributive adjectives in English. It draws on a distinction between compound-external (i.e. syntactic) and compound-internal (i.e. morphological) modification. An analysis is presented of more than 1000 pertinent cases, which are roughly equally divided into two-, three- and four-noun…

This research investigated 12-month-olds' ability to use person-specific language to determine to which of several absent things a person is referring. Infants were introduced to two experimenters who played separately with a different ball. One researcher asked infants to retrieve her object when both balls were hidden. Infants selected the…

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., "the big"...) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a…

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of…

In addition to serving as question markers with interrogative force, "wh"-words such as "shenme" "what" in Mandarin Chinese have a noninterrogative meaning. For the noninterrogative meaning, these words have been typically analyzed as negative polarity items, i.e., as "wh"-pronouns that are similar in…

Learner corpora have become prominent in language teaching and learning, enhancing data-driven learning (DDL) pedagogy by promoting "learning driven data" in the classroom. This study explores the potential of a local learner corpus by investigating the effects of two types of DDL activities, one relying on a native-speaker corpus (NSC)…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

The study uses an elicited imitation (EI) task to examine the effect of the native language on the use of the English nongeneric definite article by highly proficient first-language (L1) Spanish and Russian speakers and to test the hierarchy of article difficulty first proposed by Liu and Gleason (2002). Our findings suggest that there is a clear…

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native-like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the passive. The apparent cross-linguistic delay of the verbal passive compared to other constructions suggests children's knowledge is somehow restricted, leading some to propose the difficulty arises because of syntactic maturation (Wexler 2004, Orfitelli 2012) or because of a heavy reliance…

This dissertation presents a synchronic and diachronic study of Pingelapese pronouns and auxiliary verbs--"ae", "e", "aen", and "en". Synchronically, Pingelapese employs subject pronominal clitics, not subject agreement markers, unlike Proto-Micronesian and many other contemporary Micronesian languages.…