The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

aaaPlural marking differs across languages. Some must mark plurality using an overt morpheme (e.g. English, Russian), while others mark it optionally (e.g. Korean) or lack an explicit plural morpheme (e.g. Chinese). This crosslinguistic difference in plural marking has received much attention in research exploring language transfer in the context…

In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

This paper applies the theories of linguistic distance and translanguaging to analyse the pedagogy of teaching vocabulary and grammar in English to Malay-English bilinguals who are struggling to read in English. More specifically the paper explores how the teacher tried to create cross-linguistic transfer and how the students display…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

Variation in verbal morphology is a phenomenon which has been the object of linguistic research for a long time. Two competing sets of predictions have been put forth to account for the distribution of verbal inflections in learner language: The Aspect Hypothesis posits that learners predominantly use inflections to indicate categories of lexical…

Achieving biliteracy is a remarkable accomplishment, and it is important to understand the range of factors that permit its successful realization. The authors investigated a factor known to affect reading in monolingual children that has received little attention in the second-language literature: morphological awareness. The researchers tracked…