This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

This study examines second language (L2) acquisition of English generic noun phrases (NPs) by Spanish, Turkish and Japanese learners. The aim is to identify the role of the first language (L1) in the L2 acquisition of definite NP-level generics and indefinite sentence-level generics with singular, bare plural, and mass generic nouns. The four…

Research has described the key role of formulaic language use in both written and spoken communication (Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002), as well as in relation to L2 learning (Ellis, Simpson--Vlach, & Maynard, 2008). Relatively few studies have examined related fixed and semi-fixed multi-word units (MWUs), which comprise fixed parts with the potential…

Separating text into meaningful language chunks, as with visual-syntactic text formatting, helps readers to process text more easily and language learners to recognize grammar and syntax patterns more quickly. Evidence of this exists in studies on native and non-native English speakers. However, recent studies question the roll of VSTF in certain…

Corpus linguistics has established that language is highly patterned. The use of patterned language has been linked to processing advantages with respect to listening and reading, which has implications for perceptions of fluency. The last twenty years has seen an increase in the integration of corpus-based language learning, or data-driven…

The use of online language corpora in L2 teaching and learning is gaining momentum largely because corpora are an easily accessed source of language input that potentially provide rich and authentic lexico-grammatical data. This can be of particular use for students' writing as its incorporation can enhance the appearance of native-like fluency.…

Gumuz is a Nilo-Saharan dialect cluster spoken in the river valleys of northwestern Ethiopia and the southeastern part of the Republic of the Sudan. There are approximately 200,000 speakers, the majority of which reside in Ethiopia. This study is a phonological and grammatical analysis of two main dialects/languages: Northern Gumuz and Southern…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., "tree," "picnic table") and phrasal nominals (e.g., "black bird," "birds that like rice") are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped…

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses ("il veut pas payer pour ca [approximately] il veut pas payer pour" "he doesn't want to pay for [it]") and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative…

This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject-verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish-German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with "correct" gender agreement--as in "der dog" ("der" being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for "dog", "hund", being masculine as well). However, these could obviously be due to chance or to the indiscriminate use of a default…

One of the questions facing language instructors is how direct vocabulary instruction should be. Much recent research into vocabulary acquisition and studies of learning strategies strongly indicates that the explicit vocabulary learning vs. implicit vocabulary learning issue is not a dichotomy, but rather a continuum (Hunt and Belgar, 2005; Lee…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…