This study investigates the status of nominal functional categories in the Old High German (OHG) "Isidor" and "Tatian" translations and Otfrid's "Evangelienbuch" and the structure of the extended nominal group, including the Noun Phrase (NP) and the functional phrases Determiner Phrase (DP), Case Phrase (KP) and Number Phrase (NumP), which govern…

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage…

This study investigates whether congruency (+/- literal translation equivalent), collocate-node relationship (adjective-noun, verb-noun, phrasal-verb-noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners' learning collocations at the initial stage of form-meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis…

Investigations into early vocabulary development, including the timing of the acquisition of nouns, verbs and closed-class words, have produced conflicting results, both within and across languages. Studying vocabulary development in Irish can contribute to this area, as it has potentially informative features such as a VSO word order, and…

This study investigates the development of plural adjective agreement in Hebrew, focusing on the consolidation of Hebrew number/gender morphology in children and adolescents across the school years in comparison with adults. A total of 240 Hebrew-speaking participants in seven consecutive grade levels (kindergarten to sixth grade) plus a group of…

How recurrent typological patterns, or universals, emerge from the extensive diversity found across the world's languages constitutes a central question for linguistics and cognitive science. Recent challenges to a fundamental assumption of generative linguistics--that universal properties of the human language acquisition faculty constrain the…

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

This paper presents findings from two eye-tracking studies designed to investigate the role of metrical prosody in silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read stress-alternating noun-verb or noun-adjective homographs (e.g. "PREsent", "preSENT") embedded in limericks, such that the lexical stress of the homograph, as determined by context,…

Much of the recent discussion surrounding the second language acquisition of morphology has centered on the question of whether learners can acquire new formal features. Lardiere's (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly approach offers a new direction for research in this area by emphasizing the challenges presented by crosslinguistic differences in the…

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning…

This study investigates the role of previously acquired linguistic systems, Mazandarani and Persian, in the acquisition of third language (L3) English at the initial stages. The data have been obtained from 31 students (age 13-14 years), testing the placement of attributive possessives in a grammaticality judgment task, an element rearrangement…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of…