We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition)…

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound-meaning relation was learned from a corpus of phonologically transcribed child-directed speech by using the linear discriminative learning (LDL) framework (Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan,…

This study seeks to uncover the theoretical bases for the production of the classical Arabic phonetic terms and their elements in the means of generating terms for both lexical semantics and conceptual semantics. The research problem is concerned with examining the roots of generating these phonetic terms and determining the categories of their…

Evidence from neuropsychological studies of individuals with brain damage post-stroke has supported the separation of working memory (WM) capacities for semantic (word meaning) and phonological (speech sound) information. These separate capacities have been shown to play different roles in supporting multiword language production, with semantic WM…

Compound surnames in Japanese show complex phonological patterns, which pose challenges to current theories of phonology. This dissertation proposes an account of the segmental and prosodic issues in Japanese surnames and discusses their theoretical implications. Like regular compound words, compound surnames may undergo a sound alternation known…

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

A sample of political expressions that have been common in Arab media since the Arab Spring in 2011 was collected from TV newscasts, online news websites and social media pages. Analysis of their structure, denotative and connotative meanings revealed the following features: (i) Use of lexical hybrids ([foreign characters omitted]; (ii) revival of…

Recent research has shown that cognate word processing is modulated by variables such as degree of orthographic and phonological overlap of cognate words and task requirements in such a way that the typical preferential processing observed in the literature for cognate words relative to non-cognate words can be annulled or even reversed (Comesaña…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

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…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Grammatical gender embedded in determiners, nouns and adjectives allows indirect and more rapid processing of the referents implied in sentences. However in a language such as Spanish, this useful information cannot be reliably retrieved from a single source of information. Instead, noun gender may be extracted either from phono-morphological,…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

Among the many ways in which sounds alternate in the world's languages, changes in the order of sounds (metathesis) are relatively rare. Mutsun, a Southern Costanoan language of California which was documented extensively before the death of its last speaker in 1930, displays three patterns of synchronic consonant-vowel (CV) metathesis. Two of…