Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to determine whether a combination of English-language measures and a parent questionnaire on first-language development could adequately discriminate between English-language learners (ELLs) with and without language impairment (LI) when children had diverse first-language backgrounds. Method:…

This study investigated contemporary Japanese college students' attitudes towards Japan English (JE) and American English (AE) through a verbal guise test (VGT) as well as a questionnaire. Forty-four Japanese college students listened to four Japanese and four North Americans reading a text in English, rated them in terms of solidarity-related…

Given that this special issue is devoted to the acquisition and processing of inflectional morphology by second language (L2) learners, the question in the title may appear redundant. However, recent research on first language (L1) and L2 morphological processing has challenged basic assumptions about the status of inflectional morphology in…

In this study, the scripts of 288 television episodes were analyzed to determine the extent to which vocabulary reoccurs in related and unrelated television programs, and the potential for incidental vocabulary learning through watching one season (approximately 24 episodes) of television programs. The scripts consisted of 1,330,268 running words…

Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n = 32 each, average age = 7, 11,…

This paper provides a typological interpretation of differences between Chinese and English in grammatical metaphor (GM), a phenomenon arising from the interaction of semantics and lexicogrammar and extending the meaning potential in a language. This paper first describes typological features in Chinese and English in terms of the three variables…

This study shows further evidence for triggered codeswitching. In natural speech from a Dutch-English bilingual, codeswitches occurred more often directly next to a cognate (or "trigger word") than elsewhere. This evidence from typologically related, cognate languages extends previous evidence for triggering between typologically unrelated…

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced…

Research on syllable weight in generative phonology has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal hierarchy of clearly delineated categories (e.g. light and heavy). As I discuss, canonical weight-sensitive phenomena in phonology, including quantitative meter and quantity-sensitive stress, can also treat weight…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

In natural languages some syntactic structures are simpler than others. Syntactically complex structures require further computation that is not required by syntactically simple structures. In particular, canonical, basic word order represents the simplest sentence-structure. Natural languages have different canonical word orders, and they vary in…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, this study was conducted to compare English communicative competency achievement between two different models of instruction. Adult English language learners (AELLs) participated in either the communicative task-based (CTB) or in a more traditional (MT) language instructional approach. The goal of the…

Learners of third language (L3) German and L3 French studied unfamiliar verbs that were cognate with first language (L1) Spanish equivalents, second language (L2) English equivalents, or neither. We examined whether learners would assume that the verbs shared syntactic frames with cognate forms in the typologically closer language. In immediate…

Research in the field of third language acquisition has consistently identified two key factors which have an effect on the ways in which the two known languages may influence the acquisition of a third. These factors are language distance (typology) and language status (more specifically, second language, L2, or non-native language status). To…

This article identifies empirical evidence (Dao, 2007; in preparation) conflicting with Processability Theory's (PT) prediction that in acquisition of English as a second language (ESL), plural-marking emerges first in bare nouns and only later in numeric expressions. Specifically, it presents results from Dao's (2007) cross-sectional study of ESL…