The article discusses the potential of combining learner corpus research with experimental studies in order to fine-tune the understanding of learner language development. It illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological approaches with data from an ongoing study of the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by French…

The word-superiority effect (WSE) describes the superior recognition of word constituents in a word, as opposed to a non-word, context. In this study, the WSE was used as a diagnostic tool to examine the modulatory effect of word semantic transparency on the degree to which Chinese bimorphemic compound words are lexically represented as unitised…

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., "While the lovers kissed the baby played alone"). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases ("the bride and the…

The main aims of this qualitative study are to identify and categorise the types of lexical borrowings from the three main Malaysian languages which are the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages used by 203 ESL teachers, to what extent these lexical borrowings are used and for what reasons. This study has identified a new category…

Linguists generally acknowledge that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis--phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are used to describe such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languages.…

Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a…

This study presents a comparative analysis of the clausal architecture and sentential negation in East (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), West, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian), and South (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Slovenian) languages. Using the Minimalist Program, I analyze the syntactic structure…

This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of…

This paper examines two issues concerning nonagreeing "don't" in child English, e.g., "He don't fit". (1) Do children know that "don't" consists of auxiliary "do" plus sentential negation, or do they misanalyze it simply as negation? I argue that the former claim yields both empirical (distributional) and conceptual advantages, while the latter…

Comparison of Teaching Tense through Texts and Drills: A Case Study in Thailand was to study the effectiveness, the causes and advantages and disadvantages of the effects following from these teaching methods. Both grammar classes of grade 11 students of English Program Department of Assumption College Thonburi were taught by two different…

Whereas most English language sub-typing schemes for dyslexia (e.g., Castles & Coltheart, "1993") have focused on reading accuracy for words varying in regularity, such an approach may have limited utility for reading disability sub-typing beyond English in which fluency rather than accuracy is the key discriminator of developmental and individual…

The role of morphology in reading development was examined by measuring participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing either a hyphenated (e.g., "ulko-ovi" "front door") or concatenated (e.g., "autopeli" "racing game") compound. The participants were Finnish second, fourth, and sixth…

This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students' uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students' beliefs about written CF were first…

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It…