Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments…

Knowledge of collocations facilitates second language (L2) learning by enhancing accuracy and fluency. However, acquiring L2 collocations is often challenging for learners. One factor contributing to this difficulty is incongruency between first and second languages (e.g., "draw distinctions" in English corresponds to do…

Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30…

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we…

This article analyzes the acquisition of the passive voice in Northern East (NE) Cree and pays particular attention to the interaction of frequency effects and language-specific cues in the way children form and employ expectations, the process of anticipating oncoming structure in the ambient language. The passive has long been of interest in…

This study was designed to investigate the translation of laws from Thai into English with a focus on the use of modal 'shall' in the translations. As the trend of plain legal English continues to rise in the contemporary legal environment, some legal practitioners -- lawyers, judges and legal drafters -- have perceived that the use of the modal…

Young learners are known to extend verb regularity further than it actually is. When it happens, this children's overregularization phenomenon can be a result of several reasons: a failed linguistic development due to confusion between rules and memory, a lack of feedback from adults, and problems with cognitive development. The present study…

Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of…

The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response…

This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: "age-ru" 'give,' "kure-ru" 'give,' and "mora(w)-u" 'receive.' These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For "age-ru" 'give,' the…

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier…

Critical thinking, creativity, communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, empathy, resilience, ambition, grit, and innovation (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). These skills, often referred to as 'soft' skills, are considered a requirement for employment and advancement for the 21st-century graduate (Carnevale & Smith, 2013).…

The introduction of modal verbs in English textbooks across levels in China was surveyed and compared with Chinese learners' use in writing to explore the potential impact of textbook introduction on learners' real use. The results have revealed: (1) divergences between the sequence of modal verb presentation in textbooks and their frequency order…

Purpose: Assessing whether a book is relevant or suitable for use in teaching materials is not an easy and haphazard matter, various methods and theories have been offered by researchers in studying this matter. Taking a study of the context of textbooks, researchers found the urgency that textbooks are a foundation for education, socialization…