Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language…

Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention…

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

The current study investigates the expression of progressive and habitual aspect in second language Spanish, integrating theoretical insights from usage-based and concept-oriented approaches to second language acquisition, along with quantitative sociolinguistic methods. To address the full breadth of forms involved, the study examines variation…

This paper seeks to outline and describe the features of Ewe causative verbs and how they encode causative events. It explores the sub-lexical analysis of verbs' meanings since they form the basis of the classification of causal relations that allow us to explore the different imports between (sub-)events and how these events are structured, and…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

This paper is based within the framework of step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation. The underlying philosophy behind this approach is that when specific aspects of legal translations are tackled in isolation and trainees become aware of the pitfalls involved and the possible solutions, this helps them in further training as well as in…

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the 'variation sets' proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese.…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

Background: Children with language disorder across languages have problems with verb morphology. The nature of these problems varies according to the typology of the language. The language analyzed in this paper is the Standard Bangla spoken in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by more than 200 million people. It is an underexplored language with agglutinative…

Data from elicited language tasks can add to the literature on the development of the complex syntax structures of embedded complement clauses in typically developing children. In the current study, preschool-age children (n = 27) participated in two elicited language tasks focusing on three types of embedded complement clauses: infinitival…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…