Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988; 2004). However, in spite of the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are often overlooked in preparatory English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. This mixed methods study aims to investigate to what extent CNP…

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988/2004). However, despite the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are rarely taught in college-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, especially for the purposes of improving reading comprehension. This…

Bilingual children sometimes produce constructions influenced by their other language (cross-linguistic transfer). Transfer can often be predicted by the existence of overlapping and ambiguous constructions in both languages. In this paper, we investigate whether cross-linguistic transfer occurs when overlapping constructions exist, but there are…

The present experiments investigate the influence of modifier relation frequency and discourse context on the interpretation of novel noun-noun phrases (as measured by both the ease of interpretation and the types of interpretations that are provided). We assess whether people access knowledge about the relations with which the modifier is…

Analyzes two variants of subject doubling in Ontario French: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. It is proposed that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP (noun phrase), while lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant.(Author/JL)

Investigates the functional projections in second-language (L2) acquisition by examining the emergence of functional categories in the L2 acquisition of French by children. Data include the productive use of determiners, inflection, case marking, subject clitics, wh-questions, and correct negative placement. (57 references) (Author/CK)