1 The data contained in this paper is based on eldwork conducted by Rachel Nordlinger. She would like to express her gratitude to the Wambaya community for teaching her their language, especially to Molly Grueman, Mavis Hogan and Minnie Nimara. We are also grateful to Mar ia-Eugenia Ni~ no, Peter Sells and Jane Simpson for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Of course, none of ...

This article investigates the acoustic and articulatory correlates of vowel contrasts in bilingual speakers. We analyse data from bilingual speakers of Twi (Akan) and Ghanaian English, with the aim of examining how the production of the advanced tongue root vowel contrast in Twi relates to the production of the tense/lax vowel contrast in Ghanaian English. These data are compared to tense/lax v...

In English, the distinction between belief verbs, such as think, and desire verbs, such as want, is tracked by the tense of those verbs’ subordinate clauses. This has led some authors within the syntactic bootstrapping literature to propose that subordinate clause tense is an integral part of the acquisition of belief and desire predicates. This proposal is problematic since the correlation bet...

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular past tense verbs (e.g. REACH-REACHED) or irregu...

The Special Theory of Relativity is often interpreted as forcing us to accept a conceptual revolution in our thinking about space, time, and the temporal distinction between past, present, and future. Most importantly, it is claimed that the notion of absolute simultaneity that is embodied in our pre-relativistic thinking about time must be abandoned. Thus, our natural language use of linguisti...

Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular past tense verb processing have been explained in two ways: (a) separate mechanisms comprising a rule-governed process for regular and a lexical-associative process for irregular verbs; (b) a single system drawing on phonological and semantic knowledge. The latter account invokes phonological impairment as the basis of poorer perfor...

This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for participles lacking tense inflection is as diffi...

It has been shown across several languages that verb inflection is difficult for agrammatic aphasic speakers. In particular, Tense inflection is vulnerable. Several theoretical accounts for this have been posed, for example, a pure syntactic one suggesting that the Tense node is unavailable due to its position in the syntactic tree (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997); one suggesting that the interpr...

According to Hans Kamp and Frank Vlach, the two-dimensional tense operators “now” and “then” are ineliminable in quantified tense logic. This is often adduced as an argument against tense logic, and in favor of an extensional account that makes use of explicit quantification over times. The aim of this paper is to defend tense logic against this attack. It is shown that “now” and “then” are eli...

Examination of a set of non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages shows that most are aspect-prominent languages, that is, they either do not encode tense —the majority case— or, as the quotation indicates, there is reason to think that some have added tense to an original aspectual base. Comparative consideration of tense-aspect categories and morphology suggests that early and Proto-Niger-Congo were as...