Early in the genesis of Mauritian Creole (MC), the quantificational determiners of its lexifier language, French, incorporated into a large number of the nouns that they combined with, resulting in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions, yielding (in)definite, singular, plural and generic interpretations. These early changes were accompanied by the loss all inflectional morphology, as well as the loss of the French copula, and that of the Case assigning prepositions à ('of') and de ('of') which are used in partitive and genitive constructions respectively. I argue that these changes triggered a parametric shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and account for the fact that MC has a very different determiner system from its lexifier. My analysis is motivated by both Longobardi's (1994) claim that only DPs can be arguments, NPs cannot, and Chierchia's (1998b) seemingly incompatible claim that N can be an argument when it is Kind denoting. I provide detailed account of the emergence of the new MC determiners, from their first attestations in the early 18th century, to the end of the 19th century, when the determiner system settles into a form that is still used today. Following an analysis of the modern MC determiner system, I propose that MC nouns are lexically stored as argumental, Kind denoting terms, which share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals, such as their ability to occur in argument positions without a determiner. The new quantificational determiners are analyzed as 'type shifting operators' that shift Kinds and predicate nominals into argumental noun phrases. The singular indefinite article enn and the plural marker bann assign existential quantification over instances of Kind denoting count nouns, and the null definite determiner is an operator that quantifies over the totality of a set. The differential behaviour of MC count vs. mass nouns is accounted for in terms of the Number argument which must be realized for common count nouns. Some seemingly 'bare' nouns comprise a phonologically null definite determiner equivalent to French le/la and English the. Subject-object asymmetry of count nouns in MC provides evidence for the occurrence of this null element which requires licensing in certain syntactic environments. The Specificity marker la, which serves to mark anaphoric definiteness, is shown to be a 'last resort' means of licensing the null definite determiner. My syntactic analysis is within Chomsky's (1995b) Minimalist framework and a Formal Semantics (Partee 1986), both of which stipulate legitimate operator variable constructions. The loss of the French quantificational determiners, and that of the copula meant that early MC lacked overt sources of quantification at both the nominal and clausal levels. In my analysis of the emerging MC determiner system, I look at the new sources of quantification that arise in order to establish the referential properties of nouns, and I show how these various strategies are linked to the means by which the semantic features of Definiteness, Deixis, Number and Specificity are expressed, and also the means by which the syntactic function of predication is realized.

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<p>The present study aims to examine the grammar of Spanish heritage children in relation to the syntax-discourse interface by analyzing the distribution of subject pronouns in focus and topic contexts. Focus and topic are related to the information structure of a clause, the former refers to new information of the sentence and the latter indicates old or known information (Lozano-Pozo, 2003). Studies exploring this phenomenon in various combinations of languages and L2 populations have found a clear overextension and overuse of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts in pro-drop languages, where the preferred option is the null pronoun, due to cross-linguistic influence from the L1 (Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Belletti et al., 2007; Sorace et al., 2009). Considering the results of previous research, this study examines the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers exhibit knowledge of subject pronoun distribution in focus and topic contexts by comparing them to their monolingual counterparts.</p> <p>Thirteen child heritage speakers of Spanish and twenty-seven monolingual children completed a structured elicitation task which consisted of a story followed by a question asking about an embedded subject (Focus condition) or an embedded direct object (Topic condition). Results revealed no overextension of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts due to cross-linguistic influence from English. However, differences were found in the focus condition. Heritage children diverged from the monolingual group since they produced considerably fewer instances of overt subject pronouns. It is hypothesized that heritage children are opting for the null pronoun option as the default option, which suggests they are prolonging the Null Subject Stage (Hyams, 1986). This finding points to protracted development due to a lack of activation of the language. Further findings are discussed taking into consideration current approaches that examine the effects of language dominance, exposure, and use.</p>

<p><strong>Background: </strong>Many persons with aphasia (PWA) show deficits in sentence production and comprehension which are, in part, attributed to an inefficient mapping between messages and syntactic structures. Structural priming—the tendency to repeat a previously encountered sentence structure—has been shown to support implicit syntactic learning within and across production and comprehension modalities in healthy adults. Structural priming is effective in facilitating the production or comprehension of sentences in PWA. However, less is known about whether priming in one modality changes PWA’s performance in the other modality, which is crucial evidence needed for developing structural priming as a cost-effective intervention strategy in aphasia.</p> <p><strong>Aims</strong>: This study examined (a) whether production to comprehension cross-modality priming is effective in PWA, (b) whether priming-induced changes in syntactic comprehension lasted even in the absence of an immediate prime, and (c) whether there is a significant correlation between individuals’ priming effects and the change in their comprehension following priming.</p> <p><strong>Methods & Procedures: </strong>Thirteen PWA and 13 age-matched control participants completed a training study comprised of three phases: a pre-test, a production-to-comprehension priming block, and a post-test. In the pre- and post-tests, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task with sentences involving interpretations of an ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., The teacher is poking the monk <u>with a bat</u>). Participants were free to choose a picture corresponding to a high attachment (HA; e.g., the teacher is using the bat to poke the monk) or a low attachment (LA; e.g., the monk is the one holding the bat) interpretation. In the priming block, participants produced LA sentences as prime and then completed a sentence-picture matching task for comprehension targets, similar to the pre-test. </p> <p><strong>Results</strong>: Age-matched controls and PWA showed a significant priming effect when comparing the priming block to the pre-test. In both groups, the priming effect persisted when comparing picture selections in the pre- and post-tests. At the individual level, age-matched controls who showed larger priming effects also selected more LA pictures in the post-test compared to the pre-test, indicating that the priming effect accounted for the magnitude of change from the pre- to post-test. This correlation was also found in PWA.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong>: The findings of this study suggest that production-to-comprehension cross-modality priming is effective and persistent in PWA and controls, in line with the view that structural priming is a form of implicit learning. Further, the findings support sentence processing models that suggest syntactic representations are shared between production and comprehension, and therefore, production influences future comprehension. Cross-modality priming from production to comprehension has clinical potential to improve sentence processing in PWA. </p>

<p><b>Purpose:</b> Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech perception deficits in SSD. The primary aim of the current study was to compare the neural activity underlying speech perception in young children with SSD and typical development (TD).</p><p><b>Method</b>: Twenty-eight children ages 4;1-6;0 participated in the current study. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while children completed a speech perception task which included phonetic (speech sound) and lexical (meaning) matches and mismatches. Groups were compared on their judgment accuracy for matches and mismatches as well as the mean amplitude of the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) and N400 ERP components.</p><p><b>Results</b>: Children with SSD demonstrated lower judgment accuracy across the phonetic and lexical conditions compared to peers with TD. The ERPs elicited by lexical matches and mismatches did not distinguish the groups. However, in the phonetic condition, the SSD group exhibited a more consistent left lateralized PMN effect and a delayed N400 effect over frontal sites compared to the TD group.</p><p><b>Conclusions</b>: These findings provide some of the first evidence of a delay in the neurophysiological processing of phonological information for young children with SSD compared to their peers with TD. This delay was not present for the processing of lexical information, indicating a unique difference between children with SSD and TD related to speech perception of phonetic errors.</p>

<p>Previous research has shown that the type of ditransitive sentence preferred by English speakers in a particular linguistic context is significantly influenced by the relative ‘givenness’ of the post verbal arguments (i.e. the assumption that the referent of a linguistic expression is known to the speaker/hearer). This ‘givenness constraint’ has also been shown to play a role in the ditransitive sentence preferences of bilingual English speakers. Some have claimed that the realization of the givenness constraint in the ditransitive sentence preferences of bilingual English speakers is significantly influenced by the characteristics of their dominant language; however, no studies that I am aware of have explicitly compared the preferences of speakers whose dominant languages feature different sets of ditransitive sentence types, making this claim difficult to evaluate. Additionally, the effects of task type (i.e. the experimental task(s) employed by a particular study), and variables related to speakers’ experience with English and English proficiency, relative to language background are unclear. This study attempts to clarify the role of language background in the realization of the givenness constraint by recruiting three groups of English speakers: German-English bilingual speakers living in Germany, Spanish-English bilingual speakers living in Mexico, and monolingual English speakers living in the United States. The three groups completed three tasks, all of which were administered over the internet: a scalar acceptability judgement task, a forced choice task, and a self-paced reading task. The results from the two bilingual groups showed significant effects of language background, even after factors related to English proficiency and English experience were taken into account. The results support an interpretation where language background plays a significant role in the realization of the givenness constraint on bilingual speakers’ ditransitive sentence preferences. </p>

<p>While pronunciation has previously been described as a neglected skill in the second language classroom, a growing body of literature has demonstrated that pronunciation training improves students’ productions (Derwing & Munro, 2005). Mispronunciations have been shown to impact comprehensibility, intelligibility, and accentedness (Derwing & Munro, 2009). As pronunciation instruction methods have begun to be the subject of empirical research, Visual Feedback (VF) has begun to emerge as a novel method for teaching pronunciation. This method has been shown to be particularly effective for teaching voice onset time (VOT), a characteristic of voiceless stop consonants (e.g., /p, t, k/). Worth noting, English and Spanish differ concerning VOT, with English employing long VOTs (30-100ms) and Spanish short VOTs (0-30ms) (Lisker & Abramson’s, 1964). Previous research has focused exclusively on employing VF for shortening VOT, although there are some compelling reasons to question whether the size and nature of the effect would be similar for lengthening VOT. The present study examines the potential effectiveness of VF as a means of lengthening the VOT of Spanish learners of English.</p> <p>The participants of the study were twenty-six students from a large Colombian university. The experiment design consisted of a pretest, three VF interventions, a posttest, and a delayed posttest. The tests were composed of two tasks, differing in their complexity: recording words in isolation and words in utterances. Stimuli consisted of English words (n= 4266) with word-initial voiceless stops (/p, t, k/). Stimuli were controlled for stress, following vowel, and word familiarity  and were measured for VOT using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2022).</p> <p>Results from statistical analysis coupled with a visual inspection of the data indicated that the experimental group performed similarly in the three stages of the study and that the visual feedback paradigm did not result in changes in VOT. However, some degree of variation was found among the participants concerning their average VOTs. While some participants showed an overall increase (i.e., improvement) in English VOTs for the three phonemes /p/, /t/, and /k/ over time, other participants did not. In general, most of the participants produced English-like VOTs in the pretest, constituting a degree of ceiling effects. The rate of exposure to the target language and the saliency of English are factors that could have played a role in the development of the VOT scores of the participants before the study. Therefore, the discussion focuses on both the nature of the individual variability and the theoretical implications of ceiling effects found in the current study versus the lack of ceiling effects in other studies with similar populations.</p>

<p>This study examines the distribution of adverbs among child heritage speakers of Spanish. As demonstrated by previous research, the grammar of Spanish heritage speakers can be compared to that of monolingual speakers, but with slight differences in their use and interpretation that can occur given their language dominance, usage, and exposition to the heritage language (Camacho & Kirova, 2018). In adverb placement, a relevant difference comes with verb-raising, a syntactic feature that allows the verb (V) to move in the sentence, and that is common in romance languages, but uncommon in morphologically poor languages such as English (Camacho & Sanchez, 2017; Guijarro-Fuentes & Larrañaga, 2011). Other differences in adverb distribution also stem directly from their semantic use and interpretation (Zagona, 2002), differences that may create instances of cross-linguistic influence or transfer between English and Spanish grammars. Hence, this study intends to study the extent to which these phenomena are produced in adverb placement, considering the patterns of language dominance, use, and exposure of the participants and current bilingual research discussing language transfer in bilingual grammars. Hence, an elicited production task was administered to 14 child heritage speakers of Spanish from the U.S. Midwest and to a comparison group, 25 child monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico. Results suggest that child heritage speakers behave differently in their production of adverb placement compared to monolingual speakers, showing lower accuracy and little use of verb-raising structures that allow them to produce the post-verbal adverb position Sub-Verb-Adv-Obj. These findings suggest a different developmental path in the acquisition of adverb placement for heritage children in comparison to that of monolingual children.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The present dissertation addresses the gap of how the three contextual variables (power, distance, and imposition) affect the use and perception of pitch range and final pitch contours in Central Peninsular Spanish polar questions. The methodological approach in this dissertation combines a production experiment in the form of a contextualized sentence-reading task (e.g., Brown et al., 2014; Henriksen, 2013) and a perception experiment using a pragmatic judgment task (e.g., Nadeu & Prieto, 2011). Both tasks systematically incorporated a set of situations that included the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition. Thus, this dissertation provides a systematic analysis of power, distance, and imposition to investigate their influence on the use and perception of pitch range and pitch contours. To analyze pitch in the production experiment, a categorical analysis of final pitch contours (e.g., low-rising contour) and a quantitative analysis of prosodic features (i.e., pitch range and its conversion into semitones) were conducted. For the perception experiment, analyses included the comparison of linear mixed models to examine the perceived degree of politeness.</p><p dir="ltr">The findings presented in this dissertation support the Frequency Code Hypothesis in that they showed the relevance of pitch for signaling and perceiving politeness in requests in Spanish. The results from the production experiment suggested there are no effects of power, distance, and imposition on the selection of final intonational contours. Regarding the analysis of pitch range, the results from the production experiment indicated that the use of greater pitch range was associated with an increase in the social distance between the speakers. In the perception experiment, the results indicated that an increase in pitch range was directly associated with an increase in the perceived degree of politeness. Furthermore, the findings from this dissertation provided evidence for including a systematic analysis of the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition to conduct analyses within the politeness framework instead of analyzing the formal/informal dimension in isolation The overall results of this dissertation contribute to the understanding of how suprasegmental features are employed in showing and perceivicing politeness.</p>

<p>A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker’s knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties of both L1 and L2 are present in the production of L3 (Ionin, Montrul & Santos, 2011). Many studies have addressed perception, production and factors that influence foreign speech in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (Watkins, Rauber & Baptista, 2009). As the number of multilingual individuals rises, so does the need for studies that investigate not only SLA but also that of additional languages (i.e., Third Language Acquisition). This dissertation examines how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) occurs among English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), examining instances of vowel reduction, an aspect of phonological production. English and BP are assumed as vowel reducing languages, whereas Spanish displays negligible vowel reduction in comparison. The vowel productions in L3 BP of two multilingual groups, L1English-L2Spanish-L3BP (ESP) and L1 Spanish-L2 English-BP (SEP) were investigated in two tasks: a paragraph reading task (PRT) and a carrier phrase task (CPT). The study sought to determine whether i) a native speaker of a vowel reducing L1 and a non-vowel reducing L2 displays more or less vowel reduction in a vowel reducing L3 than a native speaker of a non-vowel reducing L1 and vowel reducing L2 and ii) how length of exposure to an L3 affects phonological production. Three fixed effects were considered: duration ratio, intensity ratio and height (F1). The goal was to ascertain whether the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) (Rothman 2011, 2015) or the L2 Status Factor Model (Bardel & Falk 2007, 2012; Hammarberg, 2001) would be a better predictor for how vowel reduction would occur in the L3. Results for duration ratio and vowel height showed no significant difference between groups ESP and SEP. Results for intensity ratio suggest L2 Status as a better predictor, as group SEP displayed more phonological transfer than the ESP group. A hybrid approach to L3 acquisition models is proposed. </p>