The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

In this paper, we first introduce functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), followed by a review of three themes of neuroimaging research on the neural correlates of reading-related skills: (1) typical and struggling readers, including developmental dyslexics, (2) an inverted U-shaped function in second language reading that portrays an…

Researchers have observed that in spoken German, the conjunctions "weil" and "obwohl" commonly occur with verb-second (V2) instead of verb-final (V[subscript f]) word order (Gaumann, 1983; Gänthner, 1993, 1996; Uhmann, 1998). Current findings document that this syntactic variant of "weil/obwohl-structures" has an…

This article concerns the use of independent "jos" "if"-clauses as directives (requests, proposals, and suggestions) in Finnish everyday conversation. It shows that clause types which are traditionally considered subordinate can be used without any main clauses and, thus, do not project further talk to follow in the same turn. Other participants…

Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper,…

For the past few decades, stylistics has emerged as a discipline that encompasses both literary criticism and linguistics. The integration of both disciplines opened many opportunities for English literature and language teachers to get creative in their teaching--by introducing the stylistic approach in their classrooms. However, in a typical…

Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as "John's ass" appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor ["John," and similarly for pronominal possessors.…

This paper explores the interaction of tone and syntax in Rutooro, a Bantu language of Western Uganda. Rutooro has lost its lexical tone but retains a phrasally defined high pitch that appears on the penultimate syllable--the default position in Bantu. This high pitch can work grammatically and in fact distinguishes between the noun phrase vs.…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…

Recently, there has been increased attention to the development of complex syntax by children with language disorder. An example is the work of Schuele and Nicholls and Schuele and Tolbert who describe the acquisition of relative clauses by a group of children with SLI. The current paper presents data from 66 children with language impairment,…

Discusses the structure of Spanish noun phrases within the general framework of minimalist syntax. Proposes nominal functional category and feature checking via chain linking and suggests lexical specifications for common and proper nouns accounting for their distribution in the clause. (32 references) (Author/CK)