Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the popular Duolingo App on learning English in Thailand. Parts of the Duolingo English course for Thai speakers were used in a classroom-based intervention with two sections of English for Professional Purposes courses at a Thai university (n = 128). The students were split into two…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

We investigate the processing of "wh" questions in Niuean, a VSO ergative-absolutive Polynesian language. We use visual-world eye tracking to examine how preference for subject or object dependencies is affected (a) by case marking of the subject (ergative vs. absolutive) and object (absolutive vs. oblique), and (b) by the transitivity…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate if higher quantity, diversity, and grammatical informativeness of verb phrases in parent follow-in utterances (i.e., utterances that mapped onto child attentional leads) were significantly related to later expressive verb vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: We…

Background: Children and adults with neurotypical development employ linguistic information to predict and anticipate information. Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have weaknesses in language production and the domain of grammar but relative strengths in language comprehension and the domain of semantics. What is not clear is the extent to…

Through either morphological or functional approaches, previous research has examined how instructed second language (L2) learners develop control over a challenging area of French: the use of the "imparfait." In order to better understand this challenge, this cross-sectional study utilized both approaches and examined how 94 university…

Background: Discourse analysis procedures are time consuming and impractical in a clinical setting. Critical to clinicians are simple and informative discourse measures that require minimal time and labour to complete. Many studies, however, have overlooked difficulties that clinicians face. We recently developed core lexicon lists for nouns,…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

This conceptual paper lays out an approach to teaching biblical Hebrew in American day schools. This paper builds on extant work in the field of Jewish education on teaching biblical Hebrew and offers day school educators a theory of language instruction for teaching biblical Hebrew.

In the current study, the effect of mind map technique on the teaching success of substantive verbs is researched. To this end, pretest, post-test paired control group design was used. The study group of the study consisted of 48 students in 7/A and 7/B classes in a secondary school affiliated to the Directorate of National Education in the…

Purpose: The graphic symbol is the foundation of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for many preliterate individuals; however, research has focused primarily on static graphic symbol sequences despite mainstream commercial technologies such as animation. The goal of this study was to compare static and animated symbol sequences…

Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations ("particles") and adjectival resultatives ("ARs"). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter ("TCP"). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

Purpose: This study investigated the production of tense and subject-verb agreement in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to their typically developing (TD) peers in terms of (a) performance accuracy and (b) error patterns. Method: Participants were 14 children with DLD aged 4;0-7;10 and…