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In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI; younger, typically developing, bilingual language peers, and monolingual French comparison groups. We analyzed the children's use of direct object clitics/pronouns and definite articles in French and English. The bilingual children had more difficulty with clitics in French than articles in French and pronouns in English; and bilingual children with SLI performed like their younger, unaffected bilingual peers and like monolinguals with SLI. We argue that these findings present challenges to the domain-general perspective and support the claim that domain-specific limitations in linguistic representation are a component of SLI.

L3 acquisition has begun to attract the attention of many scholars in recent years. Heritage contexts are especially fruitful areas to understand how linguistic and nonlinguistic mechanisms interact with one another. The current study focuses on L3 English acquisition of object pronouns with L1 Turkish, L2 German speakers. We seek to find out whether the speakers could produce object pronouns accurately, whether L3 English proficiency has any effects on their acquisition, and finally, whether all object pronouns are acquired in the same way. Data for this study come from a corpus consisting of written and oral productions of 167 participants, who were students in four distinct grades, namely 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th graders at different schools in Berlin, Germany. The results reveal that participants were highly meticulous in their object pronoun use. Also, no clear L1 effect was observed, while L2 impact is implied. Lastly, proficiency and linguistic features are noted as significant factors that have an impact on L3 acquisition.

Despite the notion that written Arabic is invariable across the Arab world, a few researchers, using large corpora to discover patterns of usage, have demonstrated regional differences in Arabic writing. While most such research has focussed upon the lexicon, this corpus-based study examines a syntactic difference between Egyptian and Levantine writing: the treatment of object pronouns. A search of an entire year of writing in regional newspapers found that Levantine writers tend to use the free object pronoun iyya-, placing the direct object after the indirect, about twice as often as Egyptian writers do, who for their part prefer to place the direct object before the indirect. A proposed reason for this is that the free object pronoun is used to mark the direct object in spoken Levantine vernaculars but not in Egyptian. This seems to indicate that local spoken vernaculars exert a fundamental influence on writing.

A Minimalist hypothesis about resumptive pronouns is that they should be no different from ordinary pronouns (McCloskey 2006). The article substantiates this hypothesis with respect to a particular view of pronouns: pronouns are \"elsewhere\" elements. Just as the interpretation of ordinary pronouns, on this view, is determined by competition with anaphors, so the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is determined by competition with gaps. On the basis of new facts in Hebrew and systematic differences between optional and obligatory pronouns, I argue that the tail of a relative clause movement chain is realized as the least specified form available. Since their interpretive properties are fully determined by external factors, resumptive pronouns must be part of the syntactic derivation, not items merged from the (traditional) lexicon.

A formal approach to the typology of DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING (DOM) is developed within the framework of Optimality Theory. The functional/typological literature has established that variation in DOM is structured by the dimensions of animacy and definiteness, with degree of prominence on these dimensions directly correlated with the likelihood of overt case-marking. In the present analysis, the degree to which DOM penetrates the class of objects reflects the tension between two types of principles. One involves iconicity: the more marked a direct object qua object, the more likely it is to be overtly case-marked. The other is a principle of economy: avoid case-marking. The tension between the two principles is resolved differently in different languages, as determined by language-particular ranking of the corresponding constraints. Constraints expressing object markedness are derived through HARMONIC ALIGNMENT of prominence scales. Harmonic alignment predicts a corresponding phenomenon of DIFFERENTIAL SUBJECT MARKING. This too exists, though in a less articulated form.

Evidence that L2 learners of Spanish overgeneralize indirect object pronouns (OPs) to direct object contexts with human referents and direct OPs to indirect object contexts with nonhuman referents has been provided by Zyzik (2006), Malovrh (2008), and Olsen and Juffs (2022). However, the effect of instruction on this phenomenon has not been investigated. This study addresses the influence of instruction on preempting (Rutherford, 1989) an Animacy‐based system in L2 learners of Spanish by investigating whether instruction led learners to use a Case‐based OP system rather than an Animacy‐based system and at what level instruction was most beneficial. Data were collected from 115 L2 learners divided into two groups (instructed and control) who completed comprehension and production tasks at two different times (pretest, posttest). Between the pretest and posttest, learners in the instructed group received instruction on Spanish OPs using the PACE model for grammar instruction. Results from mixed analysis of variances indicate preemption of an Animacy‐based system in both learner groups. This finding is taken as evidence that the tasks themselves led learners to change their OP systems by forcing learners to process the object pronouns and notice additional possible contexts. Instruction is often assumed to lead to language learning, but there are many unanswered questions surrounding how instruction affects language development. How does instruction affect the interlanguage grammar? Are there particular instructional techniques that are more effective for helping learners acquire certain form‐meaning mappings? This article explores the effect of instruction on L2 Spanish object pronouns.

This article presents results from a recent study that isolated grammar instruction that is deductive (i. e., involving rule presentation and metalinguistic information) as a variable and contrasted it with an instructional treatment that is inductive (i. e., focusing on form with no explicit grammar instruction). The effectiveness of these two types of instruction was compared on measures of both comprehension and production. The study also investigated the interaction between type of instruction and the morphological and syntactical features involved in the acquisition of direct object pronouns in French as a second language. The results revealed a significant advantage for the deductive instruction group. The study highlighted the difficulty of designing language measures that access implicit language knowledge. It also underlined the strong relationship that exists between the observed effectiveness of a particular type of instruction and tests/measures used.

Denominal verbs in Seri are productively formed by affixing the prefix i- to a bound noun base (such as body‐part nouns) and typically mean ‘have X’ or something related pragmatically to that meaning. The denominal verb may be morphologically and syntactically transitive or intransitive. When it is transitive, a direct object may appear in the clause which further specifies the identity of the noun which is in the verb. The noun base is typically nonreferential, although some examples in which it is referential appear to be quite acceptable.

True clitic doubling involves multiple expression of a single argument in different structural positions. In clitic doubling configurations of this kind, a clitic expresses features of its full nominal phrase associate in argument position. True clitic doubling has traditionally been argued to arise via agreement, so that the clitic is the manifestation of an agreement relation between a verb and the associate. However, another possibility exists: the clitic could be a (pro) nominal element related to the associate via movement; then, clitic doubling involves the simultaneous realization of both the head and the foot of a movement chain. Here, I argue for the latter analysis, showing that true clitic doubling, at least in Bulgarian, has the properties of movement— i.e., it does not involve agreement, as is standardly assumed for this language. I provide support for this claim by considering a number of diagnostics which distinguish between clitics that reflect agreement processes and clitics that do not. Specifically, I argue that the clitic is a reduced articulation of the higher occurrence of a raised object. Thus, the proposed analysis treats clitic doubling as an interface phenomenon which results from the interaction of two independently motivated operations of the syntactic and morphophonological components of grammar: Á-movement and morphological merger.

This study explored native English speakers' interpretations of second-language Spanish sentences featuring an animate subject and an ambitransitive verb (e. g., Escuchan bien los niños ' The children listen well'). First-(N= 37), third-(N= 39), and fifth-semester (N= 23) participants heard eight subject-verb (SV) and eight verb-subject (VS) sentences and selected from two English translations. Paired-samples /-tests indicated all levels scored significantly higher (p<. 01) for SV than VS sentences. A one-way ANO VA also showed significant differences (p<. 01) across levels for VS sentences, with fifth-semester learners significantly outperforming first-(p=.O2) and third-semester (p<. 01) learners. Findings reveal a tendency to interpret the first noun as an object in the VS sentences, contrary to the First Noun Principle.