Paradigms with conflicting data patterns can be difficult to learn, resulting in acquisition error. In this dissertation, I look at how paradigms are reanalyzed over time to gain insight into the factors that influence morphophonological learning. Existing models of morphophonology (e.g. Hare & Elman 1995; Albright 2002b,a, 2010) predict…

This experimental study investigated the impact of explicit and implicit feedback on acquiring Arabic grammar for second learners. The participants were forty-five lower-intermediate male participants studying Arabic as a second language in a Saudi Arabian language institution. All participants were equally divided into three groups; the explicit…

African American English (AAE)-speaking children's ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences was evaluated by their clinical status and grammatical structure. The study originated from a need to understand more about the tense and agreement systems of AAE speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to their typically…

This study investigates the acquisition and maintenance of periphrastic and se-passives in second language (L2), heritage (HS), and (Spanish-dominant) native Spanish speakers (NS) by addressing: (i) How accessible are Spanish periphrastic passives (which also exist in English) and se-passives (unique to Spanish) for L2ers and HSs in production?…

Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research for nearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages,…

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

Grounded in the biopsychosocial models of expressive language in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and fragile X syndrome (FXS), this dissertation included two novel studies that examined the role of biological (i.e., physiology), psychological (i.e., autistic traits, anxiety symptoms, and child affect) and social (i.e., communication partner…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California's Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brought Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more…

This study aims to identify whether the acquisition of the English copula by Arabic-speaking learners of English provides evidence for a performance or representational-based account of errors. The representational theory tested in this study is the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007) which proposes that language…

The interaction between root (i.e. non-epistemic) modal verbs and functional heads like tense and aspect has been investigated in a wealth of recent literature, particularly in the context of counterfactual conditionals (Iatridou, 2000; Arregui, 2009; a.o.) and actuality entailments (Bhatt, 1999; Hacquard, 2006). In this work, I continue this…

Generalization is the ability to apply regularities to novel instances, for example, correctly guessing that the plural for the novel English word 'wug' should be 'wugs'. Early language learners make overgeneralization errors like 'mouses', applying regularities beyond their attested uses. Theories concerned with the question of how learners learn…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…