Purpose: We measure typically developing monolingual child Spanish speakers' lexical development with a range of standard expressive and receptive tests. We also measure their comprehension of sentences with the existential quantifier "algunos" "some" to determine their abilities to generate "some, but not all" scalar…

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

The purpose of this article is to help ESL (English as a Second Language) students or English language learners (ELLs) how to express or use moods correctly when they study English. The expression of moods was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's more than twenty years' teaching experience…

Google Translate is a free and practical online translation service that allows millions of people around the globe to translate words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs into an intended target language. However, in 2015, some Google Translate users in Indonesia, filed complaints, asserting that the machine was often inaccurate, speculating that…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

The use of the infinitive was summarized and illustrated from various examples, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, and English dictionaries, in order for English language learners (whose native language is not English) to further…

This study addresses the question as to what cognitive abilities influence performance on article choice and direct object scrambling in high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Schaeffer (2016/2018) shows that a group of 27 high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with ASD, aged 5-14, overgenerates the…

We present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without…

This research was aimed at investigating L1 Thai learners' English word stress production in two aspects of English words -- 1) English words with different suffixes: suffixes affecting stress shift, i.e. '-ic' (e.g. 'fantástic'), '-ity' (e.g. 'idéntity') and '-tion / -sion' (e.g. 'eléction') and suffixes demanding stress, i.e. '-oon' (e.g.…

Purpose: This follow-up study examined whether a parent intervention that increased the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parent input and accelerated children's sentence diversity (Hadley et al., 2017) had indirect benefits on tense/agreement (T/A) morphemes in parent input and children's spontaneous speech. Method: Differences in…

The topic of this dissertation concerns the ways that (IN)ANIMACY distinctions interact with various sub-systems of the human language faculty, in particular, morpho-syntax. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), morpho-syntax and ANIMACY can be pit against each other directly on the same set of target words, allowing a close inspection of the…

Background: According to some studies, sentence comprehension is diminished in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, but they differ on what underlies the sentence comprehension impairment. Sentence comprehension in AD patients has been studied mainly in the English language. It is less clear how patients with AD speaking a morphologically rich…

Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like "Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame" might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which…

Purpose: The abilities of 5-year-old children with and without language impairment (LI) to detect anomalies involving lexical items and grammatical morphemes in stories were compared. The influence of sentence versus discourse context on lexical anomaly detection rates was explored. Method: The participants were read 3 story scripts and asked to…

This study examines whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) acquiring a language with a rich case marking system (Hungarian) have difficulty with case, and, if so, whether the difficulty is comparable for spatial and nonspatial meanings. Data were drawn from narrative samples and from a sentence repetition task. Suffixes were…