Research has shown that non-native background languages (L2s) can play an important role in the acquisition of an L3/L[subscript n]. However, only a few studies have focussed on positive transfer from an L2 to an L3/Ln in the context of multilingual language acquisition of Romance past tenses. The present study therefore analyses the acquisition…

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…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

Monolingual English speakers and Chinese-English bilinguals were compared on their lexical decision performance in a masked priming experiment where the prime and target ended in the same embedded word. All primes were nonwords where the letters in addition to the embedded word did not form a morpheme (e.g., the "sab" of…

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

Background: Intervention studies have reported the advantage of teaching children about morphemes for spelling, but direct comparisons between explicit and implicit teaching have been examined systematically in relation to only a few morphological rules. Aims: This study compared explicit versus implicit teaching of the functional rule for the…

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…

The study aimed at looking into the phenomenon of diminution in Arabic language as compared to affixes in English language in terms of structure and meaning. The study also investigates the relevance of diminutives in Arabic language to the problem of "differences in form" that Mona Baker discusses in her influential book, in Other…

As far as the main purpose of teaching and learning of the Grammar of a language is concerned, it should tell the teachers and learners the principles and parameters of sentence construction in the given language, i.e. English Language in the context of the discussion in this paper. Incidentally, the grammatical device of tense becomes more…

Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

This article introduces a novel, holistic framework--named Dr. Mosaik--that encompasses explanations of the entire tense-aspect system, while highlighting eight comprehensive rules that explain the main workings of the system. In turn, this provides a limited number of "anchor points" on which to time-efficiently address instruction and…

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

The article is devoted to studying the principles of the language economy of modern English word-forming. The most productive ways of word-formation are highlighted, illustrating the tendency of the language to compress nominative units. In the system of English word-formation, the most effective ways to save speech are affixal word formation,…