Abstract: This study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking children can demonstrate adult-like syntactic competence. Mandarin-speaking 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of agent-patient relations across four Mandarin transitive constructions with the novel verbs: SVO construction, ba-construction, subjectless ba-construciton, and topicalization construction were examined using...

The present study uses the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS) measure to assess the effect of language, speaking style, and age on rhythm. Three experiments using a weighted mean of the EMS called the spectral centroid were conducted. The first examined rhythm in English and Croatian across conversational and clear speaking styles. The second experiment compared rhythmic characteristics of mono...

In light of the studies that investigate when and how English-speaking young children exhibit adult-like abstraction of syntax, this study explores these issues by examining Mandarin-speaking preschoolers ranging from 2to 5-year-olds’ comprehension of the Mandarin SVO-, ba-, long-passive, and short-passive constructions using the forced-choice pointing paradigm. The results indicated that at th...

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the state of the science on uxoricide, including qualitative findings on 47 survivors. Two qualitative interviews were conducted between January 2004 and January 2005 with 47 convenience sample adult survivors of uxoricide. Data were analyzed using hermeneutic analysis. A number of themes emerge, such as later experiences with violence, i...

This report describes a pilot study investigating whether adult listeners are able to identify the dialect of child speakers from the recordings of isolated words. The recorded children are either speaking a Stockholm dialect or a Scanian dialect. Despite low agreement between the nine adult listeners, the results show that adult listeners can indeed identify dialect even in isolated short word...

Abstract We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (L n ) speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands study or work. Performance all four skills turned out monotonically after age arrival about 25 years, similar developmental trajectories observed earlier aging rese...

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic ...

Purpose: This study examines the extent to which language skills of adult speakers heritage (HL) English in a Hebrew-speaking society are affected by individual HL input patterns and cross-linguistic influence. Methodology: Adult HL-English who grew up families with one ( N = 22) or two 25) English-speaking parents were compared baseline group native emigrated Israel as adults 20). Data: Profic...