This article analyzes the acquisition of the passive voice in Northern East (NE) Cree and pays particular attention to the interaction of frequency effects and language-specific cues in the way children form and employ expectations, the process of anticipating oncoming structure in the ambient language. The passive has long been of interest in…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a predictive model of Spanish heritage grammars by applying recent advancements in machine learning to ferret out factors and covariates that give rise to the Spanish subjunctive. Given that "[p]redictive models would entail that we have a far better understanding of the various…

The aim of the current study is to determine the distribution of verb valency-driven errors of secondary school students. To this end, this study is framed as a survey research. The sample of the study consists of 200 secondary school students in three schools with different socioeconomic levels. The content and teaching of morphological verb…

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness, the possessive…

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…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…

This article presents a review of studies that investigated the advantage of morphological awareness and knowledge of basic morphemes that comprise verbs in Arabic among normal and dyslexic native Arabic readers, and discusses the role of Arabic morphology in reading. The review included studies on Arabic as well as some studies on Hebrew, since…

This research addresses implicit learning of temporal meanings in English by adult non-native readers of German, a language without morphosyntactic imperfective aspect. Twenty-four learners from mixed first languages participated in a norming study assessing unenhanced aspect awareness. Then, in a second experiment, 91 native-German learners…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

The present investigation examines intra-speaker variability in heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish by focusing on the potential effects of two variables in their acquisition of mood: lexical frequency and morphological regularity. To do so, this study tested participants' interpretation and use of early-acquired mood alternations conveying either…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…