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 study addresses the question as to what cognitive abilities influence performance on article choice and direct object scrambling in high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Schaeffer (2016/2018) shows that a group of 27 high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with ASD, aged 5-14, overgenerates the…

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in…

L1 grammar education is internationally criticised because of its pedagogy and its curriculum content. There is a gap between linguistic theory and school grammar in which the latter rarely makes use of possibly relevant insights from the former. At the same time, linguistics itself has never seriously undertaken attempts to identify the…

In this paper, we will describe the theoretical underpinning of many bilingual education programs for deaf children: Cummins' Linguistic Interdependence theory. Then, we will review some of the studies that have been conducted on the relation between reading and signing skills, and discuss how difficult it is to interpret their findings within…

In an attempt to explain first language attrition in emigrant populations, this paper investigates the explanatory power of a framework that has--until now--received little attention: the regression hypothesis (Jakobson, 1941). This hypothesis predicts that the order of attrition is the reverse of the order of acquisition. The regression…

This study examines the basic question about the position of dicursivity with respect to language, arising from the axiomatic statements concerning linguistic sign, form and meaning as definition components of the structural conception of language. The book is divided into two sections: I. Axiomatics of Structural Linguistics, and II. Linguistics…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…

This study examined linguistic interdependence in 98 bilingual Turkish/Dutch children of Turkish background living in the Netherlands since birth, to determine whether language and literacy skills can be transferred from 1 language. The results indicated that, although the transference of lexicon and syntax skills was limited, pragmatic,…