To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to…

When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a…

Yamdena is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia. Although many language materials are available, the language has received very little scientific attention. In this article, I present the Yamdena corpus, which includes glossed legacy materials and original fieldwork. I also give an up-to-date introduction to Yamdena grammar, sketching its…

The objective of this study was to examine the development of derivational morphological structures in the productive language of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)-speaking children. Participants were 512 typically developing Kuwaiti children aged 3;0 years to 7;11 years (243 boys and 269 girls). Five age groups at 1-year intervals were tested; each group was…

Analysis of a corpus of errors in pronouncing Proper Nouns used in English collected from the spontaneous speech of a sample of Arab informants showed that Arabic speakers have the following problems: (i) mispronouncing English vowels in "Google," "Moodle," "Uber," "Nixon," "London;" (ii) replacing…

This paper has been written to fall within the orbit of the moraic framework of the syllable, particularly the syllable weight, of Basrah Arabic. Universal as its nature is, mora, when studied and then applied, has, metaphorically speaking, the power of casting its phonological 'spell' over the problems of the morphophonology of Basrah…

This study presents findings resulting from a comparative analysis of the system of nominal morphological markers attested by various researchers in the Surgut dialect and in the badly described Salym dialect. The analysis focused on the morphological markers that form paradigms of three nominal categories: case, number and possession. It aimed at…

This paper presents results of a study aiming at identifying unique features in the system of morphological markers of the noun in four idioms of Eastern Khanty (Vakh, Vasyugan, Surgut and Salym). The analysis focuses on the paradigms of three nominal categories: number, possession, and case. It draws on the linguistic data obtained from various…

Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for formal speech and reading/writing. Earlier research suggests that some Arabic-speaking children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might favor MSA…

This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers' syntactic production, namely grammatical…

This article investigates 90 Shanghainese participants' cross-generational use and knowledge of 140 English loanwords in Shanghainese which are deemed as an important part of Shanghai Regional Culture (SRC). The quantitative results reveal that the older participants use and know much more of English loanwords than the younger ones, and that many…

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 20th, 2019. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific…

Purpose: To examine the production of plural morphology in children acquiring a dialect of Spanish with syllable-final /s/ lenition with the goal of comparing how plural marker omissions in the speech of these children compare with plural marker omissions in children with language impairment acquiring other varieties of Spanish. Method: Three…

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…