Language, as a tool for people's daily communication, has no gender bias itself. With the development of society, the language has changed correspondingly. Language serve as the mirror of society, inevitably reflecting people's minds or ideology as well as the culture and social conditions of a society. While in English, as the mother tongue of…

Subject-verb concord in English existential constructions is often viewed as problematic from both prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar and causes considerable confusion among teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). This paper aims to disentangle debates over the curious usage of the "there" + plural noun phrase…

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals' production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek-English and English-Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated…

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use…

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech…

Young children produce gestures to disambiguate arguments. This study explores whether the gestures they produce are constrained by discourse-pragmatic principles: person and information status. We ask whether children use gesture more often to indicate the referents that have to be specified (i.e., third person and new referents) than the…

Cyclic Linearization is adopted to account for the island repair of Sluicing in English. The extraction of wh-phrase out of certain islands undergoes non-successive-cyclic movement, which yields conflicting ordering statements. The derivation can be rescued by deleting all ordering statements in IP, including those conflicting ones. Two arguments…

Previous work on intrasentential codeswitching has noted that switches between determiners and their noun complements are frequent in both Spanish-English and Welsh-English data. Two major recent theories of codeswitching, the Matrix Language Frame model and a Minimalist Program approach, make potentially competing predictions regarding the source…

Making Nation's text analysis software accessible via the World Wide Web has opened up an exploration of how his learning principles can best be realized in practice. This paper discusses 3 representative episodes in the ongoing exploration. The first concerns an examination of the assumptions behind modeling what texts look like to learners with…

Innovative computer technology has sparked a revolutionary change in the area of language analysis. Individual researchers are increasingly likely to access huge corpora containing several hundred million words and to analyze the data using highly developed language analyzers via the Internet. Sketch Engine is one of such online language…

Two studies investigated 3- to 5-year-olds' trust in a reliable informant when judging novel labels and novel plural and past tense forms. In Study 1, children (N = 24) endorsed the names of new objects given by an informant who had earlier labeled familiar objects correctly over the names given by an informant who had labeled the same objects…

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the…

Research on Tip of the Tongue (ToT) states has been used to determine whether access to syntactic information precedes access to phonological information. This paper argues that previous studies have used insufficient analyses when investigating the nature of seriality of access. In the first part of this paper, these complex issues are discussed…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our…