This study investigates the effects of three types of production activities on uptake (operationalized as correct suppliance of the target structure during the treatment) and acquisition of negative adverbs in English. It also investigates the relationship between uptake and acquisition. The three production activities included a dictation, an…

This study examines the effectiveness of an output practice, i.e., Chinese-to-English translation, on promoting noticing and acquisition of a type of grammatical form, i.e., lexical phrases. It is confirmed that output is vital in facilitating learners' noticing and acquisition of the targeted linguistic forms.

This dissertation is a reference grammar of the Malimiut Coastal dialect of Inupiaq (ISO: ESI, ESK, IPK), an Eskimo-Aleut language of northwestern Alaska spoken by the Inupiat people. It complements existing descriptions of Inupiaq by filling gaps in documentation. With approximately 2000 speakers, mainly above 50 years of age, Inupiaq is…

This study reports two metalinguistic parameters that constitute the schematic control of lateral inhibitory links between translation equivalents within the bilingual lexico-semantic system of Green's ("Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 1:67-81, 1998a, "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 1:100-104, 1998b, "The…

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that L1 phonological awareness plays a role in children's ability to extract morphological patterns of English as L2 from the auditory input. In Experiment 1, 84 Chinese-speaking third graders were tested on whether they extracted the alternation pattern between the base and the derived form (e.g.,…

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

Through a research approach of emergence applied to a corpus of academic letures, I developed a theory to explicate the referents of a class of frequently used pronouns ("I," "you," and "we"), which I term the Participatory Pronouns. My theory of the Positioning of Participatory Pronouns resolves the main practical…

We used the contrastive expectation associated with scalar adjectives to examine whether listeners are sensitive to the distinction between common and privileged information during real-time reference resolution. Our results show that listeners used this distinction to narrow the set of potential referents to objects with contrasts in common…

In his insightful and stimulating article, Casasanto (this issue) argues that "people who talk differently about time also think about it differently, in ways that correspond to the preferred metaphors in their native languages. Language not only reflects the structure of our temporal representations, but it can also shape those representations.…

In his article, Wearden briefly refers to language disorders as an aspect of language that could be related to time. In this commentary, the author further elaborates on this remark, and while doing so, makes a connection to still another aspect of language related to time: tense.

Research with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are resolved efficiently, exploiting multiple cues--including referential context--to select the intended meaning. Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead on statistical properties intrinsic to the…

Pronouns typically have explicit antecedents in the prior discourse otherwise processing difficulty is experienced. However, it has been argued [Gordon, P. C., & Hendrick, R. (1997). "Intuitive knowledge of linguistic co-reference." "Cognition, 62", 325-370; Gordon, P. C., & Hendrick, R. (1998). "The representation and processing of co-reference…

This article addresses the acquisition of meaning of words and phrases that refer to aspects of the world that are not directly perceivable. It examines the patterns of semantic input that are available in the linguistic environment that provide clues to allow a child to construct a lexicon that is both broad and deep. These patterns are…

Researchers have long noted that children's grammatical morphemes are variably produced, raising questions about when and how grammatical competence is acquired. This study examined the spontaneous production of determiners by two French-speaking children aged 1 ; 5-2 ; 5. It found that determiners were produced earlier with monosyllabic words,…

I conducted this study to provide insights toward deepening understanding of association between culture and writing by building, assessing, and refining a conceptual model of second language writing. To do this, I examined culture and coherence as well as the relationship between them through a mixed methods research design. Coherence has been an…