Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings.…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…

Purpose: The finite verb morphology composite (FVMC) is a valid measure for charting children's tense development and for differentiating children with and without language impairment during preschool and early elementary years. However, it is unclear whether FVMC scores vary as a function of language sample elicitation contexts. The current study…

This study investigated the relative ease or difficulty of grammar commonly taught in intermediate (second-year) German at the university level. Previous studies have investigated the ease or difficulty of specific grammar structures, factors that make it difficult to learn L2 grammar, and teachers' and learners' perceptions of difficult grammar.…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

We investigated the role of cue weighting, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 daily exposure in L2 learning of suprasegmentals different from the first language (L1), using eye-tracking. Spanish monolinguals, English-Spanish learners, and Mandarin--Spanish learners saw a paroxytone and an oxytone verb (e.g., "FIRma-firMÓ"…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

The study examined the types of language errors made by learners in the English narrative essays. It also assessed the feedback techniques employed by teachers of English in the handling of language errors in the English narrative essays. A descriptive research design was employed to examine errors of English narrative essays of 181 form two…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention…

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed…

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a new instructional toolkit for improving English grammar skills, particularly verb tense structures, among Thai EFL students. The research objectives were (1) to evaluate the toolkit's effectiveness in enhancing students' English grammar skills in verb tense structures; (2) to examine the…