There is a considerable gap in English reading achievement between English-language learners and native speakers in the United States. Differentiation of whether English language learners' struggles are symptomatic of reading disability or related to second language acquisition is often challenging. These issues highlight the need for increased insight into reading development and disability in...

The idea of Universal Grammar (UG) as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky. Following a devastating critique from theoretical, typological and field linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of UG itself and the more general idea of language universals stan...

Unsupervised models of dependency parsing typically require large amounts of clean, unlabeled data plus gold-standard part-of-speech tags. Adding indirect supervision (e.g. language universals and rules) can help, but we show that obtaining small amounts of direct supervision—here, partial dependency annotations—provides a strong balance between zero and full supervision. We adapt the unsupervi...

This paper introduces a compositional semantics of locative prepositional phrases which is based on a vector space ontology. Model-theoretic properties of prepositions like monotonicity and conservativity are defined in this system in a straightforward way. These notions are shown to describe central inferences with spatial expressions and to account for the grammaticality of preposition modifi...

Universals have traditionally thought to obey the identity of indiscernibles, that is, it has been there can be no perfectly similar universals. But at least in conception universals as immanent, is nothing rules out being indiscernible In this paper, I shall argue useful work do, and so might reason postulate particular, postulating allow a theory identify particulars with bundles universals, ...

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world's languages, whereby inflection...

The discovery of general patterns and their subsequent explanation is a familiar method in linguistics and other cross-cultural research. This paper addresses the computerized enumeration of significant cultural and linguistic patterns, specifically implicational universals. We dispute published suggestions that the mechanical generation of universals is inadvisable, by arguing that such claims...

is thesis argues for realism about universals — the view that, in addition to particular things, there exist universals instantiated by those particular things. e rst half presents a positive case for realism. Here it is claimed that universals are needed in our ontology to serve as the respects in which things are the same, and the features or characteristics that things have in common. is ar...

The artificial language Esperanto is spoken not only as a second language, by its proponents, but also as a native language by children of some of those proponents. The present study is a preliminary description of some characteristics of the Native Esperanto (NE) of eight speakers, ranging in age from six to fourteen years. As such, it is the first of its kind – previous works on NE are either...