It is generally assumed that speakers of grammatical gender languages consider grammatical gender arbitrary, but this assumption has never been tested. Research shows that the grammatical gender of nouns can affect perceptions of the masculinity or femininity of the noun's referent in speakers of languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. However, bilingualism facilitates the developme...

While it is a defining fact of bilingualism that bilingual speakers know two languages, the way that those languages are organized in the mind is far from self-evident. Hypotheses about bilingual grammatical architecture range from the claim that there must be two separate grammars, one corresponding to each language (Genesee, Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; De Houwer, 2005), to the position that t...

If word strings violate grammatical rules, they elicit neurophysiological brain responses commonly attributed to a specifically human language processor or grammar module. However, an ungrammatical string of words is always also a very rare sequence of events and it is, therefore, not always evident whether specifically linguistic processes are at work when neurophysiological grammar indexes ar...

Grammatical Abstract UngrammaticalUngrammatical Concrete Grammatical Concrete Ungrammatical Abstract Concrete 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00Concrete 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 En do rs em en tr at es Grammatical

This study explored the effect of input vs. collaborative output tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy and their willingness to communicate (WTC). In so doing, the study utilized 3 input (i.e., textual enhancement, processing instruction, and discourse) and 3 collaborative output (i.e., dictogloss, reconstruction cloze task, and jigsaw) tasks and compared their effects on 5 Englis...

This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. This query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. For this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a...

This commentary is in two sections. The rst presents some speciically linguistic evidence regarding Dehaene's statement that, in animals and prelinguistic humans, \only very small numbers (up to about 3) can be represented accurately" 1. The second section contains some more general reeections on Dehaene's work. 1 Linguistic discontinuity around 3 or 4 Dehaene argues that adequately accurate an...