Common tests of morphological awareness measure both morphology and syntax by requiring participants to fit words and pseudowords into sentences by adding or removing affixes. We report the results of a study testing a new word level task. College students viewed transparent words (without phonological or orthographic shifts) and used a keyboard…

Reading texts may serve as a vital source of informational content and language knowledge for second language (L2) learners, which is known as the dual relevance of L2 reading (Han & D'Angelo, 2009). Text complexity, however, influences the two, determining to a great extent whether the dual outcome is attainable. Drawing on Complex Dynamic…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

An extensive body of research has investigated the role of syntactic complexity in gauging the linguistic complexity of reading texts, particularly for the purpose of determining their grade appropriateness. However, little such research has focused on adapted teaching materials for English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, and to date there…

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…

Purpose: This study provided reference data and examined psychometric properties for clausal density (CD; i.e., number of clauses per utterance) in children between ages 4 and 9 years from the database of the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). Method: Participants in the ENNI database included 300 children with typical language (TL) and…

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the "preposition stranding generalization" (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the…

This paper aims to discuss old and contemporary perspectives in understanding language acquisition taking into account the neural theory of language. Discussing a recent theory by Kuhl (2010), neural substrates of first language learning will be put forward (Berwick et al., 2013). Neural substrates of phonetic learning, word learning, sentence…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to extract key learning from intervention studies in which qualitative aspects of dosage, "dose form," have been examined for children with developmental language disorder (DLD)--in vocabulary, morphosyntax, and phonology domains. This research paper emerged from a pair of systematic reviews, aiming to…

The objectives of this study were to explore foreign tourists' responses to Thai English, a variety of English emerging in Thailand, in terms of comprehensibility, and to identify the linguistic features that made Thai English incomprehensible. One hundred international tourists in Bangkok from four regions including East Asia, Southeast Asia,…

In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…