This study analyzed the psychometric properties of scores on the Slovene version of the "Questionnaire about Interpersonal Difficulties for Adolescents" (QIDA) in a sample of 1,334 adolescents (44% boys), ranging in age from 12 to 18 years (M = 15.61). Confirmatory factor analyses replicated the correlated five-factor structure of the QIDA:…

Phrasal verbs (PVs) have recently been the object of interest by linguists given their status as phraseological units whose meaning is non-compositional and opaque. They constitute a perfect case for theories of language processing and language acquisition to be tested. Cognitive linguists have participated in this debate and shown a certain…

Research holds that, for bilingual children, a strong establishment in one language not only develops skills in that language, but also facilitates the development of a second language. The participants for this research were six nine-year-old children who were being educated in their first language, Macedonian, and also in English. This research…

This dissertation offers a detailed contrastive analysis of Contemporary Standard Russian and General American English. The guiding principle, that the goal of contrastive analysis should not be as it traditionally has been, i.e., purely pedagogical, but that it should also serve as the basis for general hypotheses of Second Language Acquisition…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

Codeswitching, or the bilingual practice of switching between two languages, is a frequently misunderstood phenomenon in many fields, including education. Given the growing number of bilingual students and English Language Learners in U.S. schools, it is imperative that the field of education be informed by current research in bilingualism and…

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials…

Three experiments demonstrate gender congruency effects (i.e., naming times of a picture are faster when the name of the target picture and a distractor noun are gender congruent) in Czech. In the first experiment, subjects named the pictures by producing gender-marked demonstrative pronouns and a noun. In the second and third experiments,…

This paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of individual multilingualism by focusing on a semi-autobiographical essay written in 1917 by an author who is usually read as a monolingual German writer but who was, in fact, multilingual and multicultural: Franz Kafka. The story is about an ape who, in order to survive his capture by the…

Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship--whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not--and modality--whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders…

The focus of this dissertation is the highly specialized and stylized liturgical language of Russian Church Slavonic (RCS). Historically, RCS has been strictly controlled by authorities and has conformed to established norms, but innovations have nevertheless arisen in response to various conditions. One major wave of innovations was a long,…

The structure of /s/-clusters has been a rather controversial subject due to their structural oddities. Studies on the acquisition of these clusters have contributed to the discussion to validate certain theoretical claims, and sonority-related issues have always been in focus. Cross-linguistic acquisition data from children with phonological…

A language currently at the nexus of change is Kashubian (in Polish: "kaszubski"), a West Slavic language spoken in northern Poland in the province of Pomerania. Termed a "regional language" by the Polish government in preparation for the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (signed in 2003…

The paper presents a contrastive analysis focusing on the differences in the use of two selected metatext categories, previews and reviews, in English and Slovene research articles. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that the use of the selected metatext categories is more restricted in Slovene academic writing than in English academic…

This paper examines the degree to which language shift or maintenance is obtained across four generations in Belarus. Linguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity receive particular attention as potential contributing factors to language shift or maintenance in the home, arguably the last bastion in terms of language maintenance. In an effort to…