The [he3-sing-male-human-pron]nominal construction encodes the knowledge that pronouns like “he” (3 person, singular, male, human) function as full nominals, encoding both a referential specifier function and an objective head function (see Ball, 2005, “A Bi-Polar Theory of Nominal and Clause Structure and Function”, this proceedings). The [be3-pressing]verb construction encodes the status of “...

Spanish verb-complement (VC) compounds, one of the most common compound types in Spanish, raise interesting questions, because they are inflected, prototypically containing a verb third-person singular present indicative. This complexity seems paradoxical, given strong restrictions Romance languages on word compounding. Based self-compiled corpus over 1,400 VC we show that compound’s may displa...

Listeners resolve ambiguity in speech by consulting context. Extensive research on this issue has largely relied on continua of sounds constructed to vary incrementally between two phonemic endpoints. In this study we presented listeners instead with phonetic ambiguity of a kind with which they have natural experience: varying degrees of word-final /t/-reduction. In two experiments, Dutch liste...

Walman, a language in the Torricelli language spoken in Papua New Guinea has an inflectional diminutive affix which occurs in agreement slots in various words, including verbs and adjectives in opposition to third person singular masculine, third person singular feminine, and third plural. It contrasts with diminutive affixes in most languages in that (1) it cannot appear on nouns; and (2) it i...

We present the case of a fluent aphasic patient who is impaired at producing nouns relative to verbs in picture naming, sentence completion, and sentence generation tasks, but is better at both producing and comprehending concrete nouns than abstract nouns. Moreover, he displays a selective difficulty in producing the plural forms of some nouns and pseudowords presented as nouns, but was able t...

PURPOSE Two-year-olds produce third person singular -s more accurately on verbs in sentence-final position as compared with verbs in sentence-medial position. This study was designed to determine whether these sentence-position effects can be explained by perceptual factors. METHOD For this purpose, the authors compared 22- and 27-month-olds' perception and elicited production of third person...

The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE ...

Many European languages have two second person pronouns, one for informal and one for formal address, such as French tu and vous, respectively.1 Such pronouns pose an interesting problem for number agreement. A second person formal subject pronoun triggers plural agreement on the finite verb regardless of whether the referent is one addressee or multiple addressees. Number agreement on non-fini...

This study addresses the impact of 2 types of written corrective feedback (WCF) on the acquisition of the third person singular -s in English. The study followed a quasi-experimental design: 2 experimental groups and 1 control group that included 57 preservice teachers from a Chilean university. The experimental groups underwent a treatment based on the provision of direct metalinguistic feedba...

Morphonotactic consonant clusters originate through morphological operations and are mostly combinations of consonants across morpheme boundaries. As they are processed faster and acquired earlier than phonotactic clusters, it is hypothesised that in speech production, morphonotactic clusters are more robust and highlighted than phonotactic clusters. The present study pursues two goals: it exam...