Overgeneralization occurs when a child uses the wrong word to name an object and is often observed in the early stages of word learning. We develop a method to elicit overgeneralizations in the laboratory by priming children to say the names of objects perceptually similar to known and unknown target objects. Experiment 1 examined 18 two-year-old…

This paper presents a model of syntax acquisition, whose main points are as follows: Syntax is acquired in an item-based manner; early learning facilitates subsequent learning--as evidenced by the accelerating rate of new verbs entering a given structure; and mastery of syntactic knowledge is typically achieved through practice--as evidenced by…

57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from…

Montrul's study is an important contribution to a recently emerged research approach to the study of bilingualism and languages in contact, characterized by its sound theoretical basis and its reliance on data from different--and traditionally non-integrated--domains of language development: bilingual first language acquisition (Muller and Hulk,…

Research investigating the relationship between language and cognition (Lucy, 1992b) shows that speakers of languages with grammatical number marking (e.g. English) judge differences in the number of countable objects as more significant than differences in the number or amount of non-countable substances. On the other hand, speakers of languages…

The aim of this paper is to reflect on bilingual performance and specifically language alternation in informal contexts. In this reflection I have focused on the language choice of bilingual speakers when they are not restricted by the social factors of formal settings to adopt one code or the other. I have adopted Poplack's framework in…

The study sought to establish the attitudes of Kenyan speakers (n = 210) towards three varieties of English: (1) ethnically marked Kenyan English, (2) standard Kenyan English and (3) native speaker English (British, American, Australian, etc). Of the three varieties, the most preferred by both rural and urban respondents for use in the media and…

The purpose of this article is to explore recent research into World Englishes (henceforth WEs) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), focusing on its implications for TESOL, and the extent to which it is being taken into account by English language teachers, linguists, and second language acquisition researchers. After a brief introduction…

The field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) brings people from various racialized backgrounds together in teaching, learning, and research. The idea of race, racialization, and racism are inescapable topics that arise in the contact zones created by teaching English worldwide and thus are valid topics to explore in the…

This article addresses the question of how second language (L2) learners understand idiomatic expressions in their second/foreign language and advances the proposition that literal meanings of idiom constituents enjoy processing priority over their figurative interpretations. This suggestion forms the core of the literal-salience resonant model of…

Investigates associations of form and meaning in the developing tense and aspect systems of adult learners of English as a Second Language. Learners at six levels of proficiency were studied using a cloze passage and compositions on the same topic. Interlanguage tense and aspect systems showed high formal accuracy but lower appropriate use. (43…

The point of departure of this study is the well-known hypothesis according to which structures that involve the syntax-pragmatics interface and instantiate a surface overlap between two languages are more vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence than purely syntactic domains (e.g. Muller and Hulk, 2001). In exploring the validity of this…

Combining psycholinguistic technologies and systems analysis created advances in motivational profiling and numerous new behavioral engineering applications. These advances leapfrog many mainstream statistical research methods, producing superior research results via cause-effect language mechanisms. Entire industries explore motives ranging from…

Selecting a statistical framework for a behavioral study has profoundly different results than does a linguistically framed research strategy. The linguistic strategy overcomes many limitations inherent in statistical strategies and offers more meaningful results. Inferential statistical studies often discuss how the findings "explain" the results…

This study analyzed the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p, t, k/ in Japanese and English by English-speaking children (n = 15) in a Japanese immersion program. The immersion children produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children and the immersion teachers, but they produced…