To understand how children develop adult argument structure, we must understand the nature of syntactic and semantic representations during development. The present studies compare the performance of children aged 2;6 on the two intransitive alternations in English: patient (Daddy is cooking the food/The food is cooking) and agent (Daddy is cooking). Children displayed abstract knowledge of bot...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

BACKGROUND The spontaneous and narrative language of Kiswahili agrammatic aphasic and non-brain-damaged speakers was analysed. The bilingual participants were also tested in English to enable comparisons of verb production in the two languages. The significance of this study was to characterise bilingual Kiswahili-English spontaneous agrammatic output. This was done by describing Kiswahili-Engl...

LinkedDictAbs = Cat ** { fun consecutive_01624944_A : A ; fun consequently_00061939_Adv : Adv ; fun conservation_06171333_N : N ; fun conspire_00562077_V : V ; fun sing_01362553_V2 : V2 ; ........ } The first line in the above given code states that the module ‘LinkedDictAbs’ is an abstract representation (note the keyword ‘abstract’). This module extends (achieved by ‘**’ operator) another mod...

Basic Valence Orientation has been suggested as a typological parameter by Nichols, Peterson, & Barnes (2004). Generalising over the entire lexicon, the idea is that languages can be distinguished as transitivising or detransitivising, depending on whether their verbs are basically intransitive or transitive and the opposite valency values require some means of derivation, such as causativisati...

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, ...