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Copyright of Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy / Godisnjak Filozofskog Fakulteta is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although native speakers (NSs) of English make plural agreement in preverbal-subject sentences (e.g., A pen and eraser *is/are...), previous studies have demonstrated that they prefer singular – not plural – agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases (NPs) in expletive there constructions (e.g., there is/are a pen and an eraser...), showing efficiency-driven processing prioritization of agreement between nearest constituents. This paper assesses whether Japanese L2 learners of English (JLE) show this tendency. The results of two self-paced reading experiments together indicated that even though efficiency-driven processing was available to L2 learners, their use was unstable due to the repeated exposure to there are NPpl- and NPpl-type sentences during the task. It seems possible that repeated exposure triggered learners' knowledge that conjoined NPs are always plural. Hence, it could conceivably be hypothesized that a learner's specific knowledge intervenes the efficiency-driven processing strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the potential of the flipped classroom model in language education, specifically for teaching grammar. The flipped model shifts traditional teaching by moving direct instruction outside class, allowing more engaging in-class activities. It also reverses teaching, putting direct instruction before class and interactive learning during class. It may stand language instructors in good stead, for it enhances engagement and comprehension. This experiment investigates its implementation, benefits, challenges, and impact on grammar learning outcomes. Notable among the challenges posed by this model, if instructors opt to avail themselves of its mechanisms, are technological barriers, including limited access to high-speed internet and a lack of compatible hardware. The study comprises an illustrative analysis that applies the model to instructing subjectverb agreement through pre-class activities, video content, quizzes, games, and essay assignments. The results palpably demonstrate an improved understanding and practical application of grammar. The flipped classroom offers transformative opportunities for language education, needing careful preparation and addressing tech challenges. It attempts to affect a qualitative leap in learning by using technology for content delivery and focusing on interactive in-class activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner's speech? If so, how does an individual's social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammar checking is one of the important applications of Natural Language Processing. Though the work in this area has been started decades before, the requirement of full-fledged grammar checking is still a demanding task. The recent revolution of Internet requires the computers not only deal with English Language but also in regional languages. People, who do not know English, tend to interact with computers through their regional language. Tamil is one such regional language which is recognized as classical (Semmozhi) language. Grammar checker application has been implemented for languages like English, Urdu, Punjabi, etc. But as far as Tamil is concerned, grammar checker is very scarce. There are many approaches to develop a grammar checker application. It can be statistical based, rule based or deep learning based. The proposed method involves hybrid approach to develop a Tamil grammar checker as Tamil has lot of grammatical features. In the proposed work, we concentrated on spell checking, consonant (Punarchi) error handling, long component letter error and subject–verb agreement errors. To tackle all these errors, combination of neural network approach as well as rule-based approach is proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, by focussing on the behaviour of polarity elements from a variety of languages from different language families (namely, Basque, Hindi, English, Romanian, Spanish, Greek, Czech, and Russian) we investigate the relationship between polarity sensitive items (PSIs) and negative polarity items (NPIs) on the one hand, and between PSIs and negative concord items (NCIs) on the other. Based on a number of contrasts that we find, we argue that: (i) if a language has PSIs it does not necessarily have NCIs; (ii) PSIs need to be distinguished from NPIs; (iii) NCIs emerge as a subtype of PSIs, not of NPIs; and (iv) all languages that show negative concord (NC) also have polarity sensitivity (PS), but the opposite does not hold. We thus postulate that PS is a general phenomenon across languages with negative polarity (NPol) and NC as possible subtypes of PS but independent among them, and argue against the standard hypothesis that NC is a special subtype of NPol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accuracy of deep learning model translation is a key index to evaluate the application performance of engineering English translation. In this paper, an automatic error detection system for English translation is proposed. In the particular task of grammar detection, researchers have gradually shifted their attention from statistical methods to neural network methods. Three deep learning algorithm models are established, and the multitask performance of the model is better than that of the conditional random field model and the LSTM-CRF model. The reason is that the multitask learning model of auxiliary tasks is included to some extent, which solves the problem of data sparsity and enables the model to be fully trained even under the condition of uneven label distribution. Thus, it performs better than other models in the task of syntax error detection. It realizes the word spelling error check based on the dictionary and uses the thought of editing distance to prompt the word error found, which can automatically check a large number of translations. On the basis of analyzing the sentence structure characteristics of engineering English translation, this paper realizes the detection of subject-verb agreement errors and analyzes the main word of the subject corresponding to the predicate verb by constructing the syntactic structure tree of the sentence, so as to realize the judgment of subject-verb agreement errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural is the property of Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject–verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors, respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems, which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarize the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgments, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Academic Social Science Studies is the property of Journal of Academic Social Science Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Agreement with coordination has been a topic of much discussion in the syntactic literature for decades. This is due to its significance in deepening our understanding of key issues, such as the way primitive syntactic operations such as Merge and Agree operate and interact with hierarchical/linear distance, the location of agreement in the grammar, and whether or not narrow syntax, just like the PF, has access to linear order when valuing agreement. This paper empirically and theoretically contributes to the growing body of literature on the topic by investigating agreement with preverbal and sandwiched coordinate phrases in Jordanian Arabic. A special focus will be directed to furthest conjunct agreement, agreement with the first conjunct in preverbal position, since it challenges the mainstream generalization that conjunct agreement occurs with the closest conjunct. The paper reports on a series of four large-scale experiments on Jordanian Arabic and shows that agreement in these domains comes in various forms. Building on Citko (2018), I propose an analysis of the facts that overcomes the problems faced by previous work and that provides support to a new perspective on the computation of agreement, by distinguishing multiple simultaneous Agree that gives rise to resolved agreement from multiple nonsimultaneous Agree, where agreement may be distributed between narrow syntax and the PF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sum, what this study thus demonstrates is that argument disambiguation plausibly played a role in the emergence of the English dative alternation, but that the history of this phenomenon constitutes a prime case of complex interactions and changes between multiple argument disambiguation strategies for different argument relations. 3 The dative alternation in a corpus of Middle English 3.1 Data and methodology This study uses a subset of the I Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English i (PPCME2), covering about 1 million words in 43 texts produced between 1150 and 1500. A significant main effect is found for both Agent-Recipient ambiguity/atypicality and Agent-Recipient ambiguity, in that both non-ambiguous instances in both cases are more likely to show DOC syntax, whereas clauses with Agent -R ecipient/ R ecipient-Theme ambiguity boost the chances of the PC (bottom row of Figure 2). Keywords: constituent order; dative alternation; disambiguation strategies; Middle English; prepositional marking EN constituent order dative alternation disambiguation strategies Middle English prepositional marking 3 33 31 02/14/22 20220201 NES 220201 1 Introduction This paper presents a cognitive linguistic approach to language change, and particularly to the question how syntactic variation can come about and be maintained. 2.2 Argument disambiguation in the history of the English dative alternation The emergence of the English dative alternation as a systematic and pervasive case of variation is commonly located in Middle English. [Extracted from the article]

This paper provides an argument for the Specifier-to-Specifier antilocality constraint (Erlewine 2016, 2020) on movement from the collective/distributive interpretative ambiguity in the dual Quantifier Phrase (DQP) kila/kilta in Standard Arabic. The paper shows that the antiagreement effect in distributive kila/kilta is due to the fact that the QP, which occupies a high position in the agreement domain of articulation, may not undergo movement into the specifier of an immediately dominating agreeing head: it is too short a movement that is blocked by antilocality. On the other hand, subject-verb agreement in collective kila/kilta surfaces since collective kila/kilta occupies a lower position in the agreement domain, making movement into the specifier of the agreeing head long enough to avoid being blocked by antilocality. The paper shows that the asymmetry observed between the collective and distributive kila/kilta with respect to (anti-)agreement can be straightforwardly accounted for under the Specifier-to- Specifier antilocality approach of Erlewine (2016, 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of the morphosyntax of number agreement of French by L1 learners. The study is based on a pilot study that investigates learners' knowledge of number agreement of two paradigms of subject-verb number agreement in French: the so-called matching paradigm in which agreement in number is expressed audibly via an alternation of the verb stem between a singular and plural forms and the mismatching paradigm in which the number agreement is not audible realized via singular vs. plural alternation. We discussed our sample's proficiency in (de-)normalizing number agreement and the implications it has for the theory of corrective feedback and linguistic input in L2 processing in Language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing has garnered considerable attention over the years, particularly concerning the impact of corrective feedback (CF) on students' errors. However, in the context of Kurdish EFL students, this area of research has received limited attention, despite its potential to enhance their grammatical accuracy in writing tasks. This paper addresses this gap by examining the impact of Explicit Written Corrective Feedback (EWCF) on Kurdish EFL undergraduate students' writing accuracy in terms of subject-verb agreement (SVA). For data collection, the study employed a mixed-method approach and recruited sixty junior EFL undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to two groups: the experimental group (n=30) received EWCF on their SVA errors for five weeks, while the control group (n=30) received only implicit feedback without correction on SVA errors. Data was collected through questionnaires and pre-and post-tests, and the results revealed that EWCF was preferred by students and was more effective in enhancing their writing accuracy in terms of SVA, as evidenced in the post-test. The study has several theoretical and pedagogical implications, including the need for instructors to provide EWCF to enhance students' grammatical accuracy in writing tasks. Further, the study contributes to the limited body of research on EFL writing in the context of Kurdish students, highlighting the need for further investigation in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the study of linguistic variation within the Government and Binding approach to parameters, pointing out some limitations of parameter schemata in language contact scenarios. Discussion is focused on the possibility that clustering effects (the schemata themselves) are more complex than conventional approaches suggest. We outline an alternative approach, directly connected to Uriagereka's typology or parameters, which is itself based on Chomsky's Theory of Formal Languages. Empirically, we focus on language contact situations, as they provide cases where variation by contact operates under what we call an Excess of Stimulus, whereby access to the relevant data is overwhelming, but somehow ignored by learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper argues that gapping in Spanish is not a single phenomenon and can be derived from different source structures. The first type of gapping in Spanish involves clausal coordination and is thus derived through TP-deletion, whereas the second type contains low coordination below TP, which allows it to be derived by either vP-deletion or Across-The-Board (ATB) verb movement whose availability depends on the subject-verb agreement patterns found in gapping. This approach also extends to cases where the conjuncts in gapping display various noncanonical word orders, which also fall under two types of gapping and can be analyzed using the same mechanisms as those applicable to SVO-conjuncts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an articulation between psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, and from a formalist-like approach of language, this paper discusses possible adaptative effects caused by operant priming effects in language variation processing, and how these effects impact processing costs associated with third-person plural variable subjectverb agreement. To do so, we ran a self-paced reading experiment that included not only constructions attested for variable verb agreement but also ungrammatical instances, aiming to check for differences in cost proportionality between variable (then grammatical) and ungrammatical instances. The experiment also included the manipulation of long stimuli, which allowed adaptive effects to be verified as a result of an operant priming effect. This type of manipulation, as far as we know, is unprecedented in studies of the psycho-sociolinguistic interface in Brazil. The results suggested different costs and adaptative effects associated with grammatical conditions (redundant and non-redundant agreements) that were not attested in the ungrammatical condition. In other words: processing variable grammatical instances is different from processing ungrammatical ones. This study, therefore, shed light on questions concerning the online processing of linguistic variation, an increasingly productive topic in linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the description and analysis of an anomalous or non-normative plural agreement phenomenon that certain Spanish verbs, named "terciopersonal" o "pseudopersonal" in the literature, present when combined with an infinitive clause whose verb selects a plural NP as its direct object (Te cuestan hacer las tareas más fáciles 'It's hard for you to do the easiest tasks'). After describing the phenomenon, we show that the finite verb does not present all the characteristics that are usually attributed to auxiliaries and we defend that the theory of nexus and junctures proposed in role and reference grammar is a useful analytical tool in order to account for the structures under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It constrains the distribution of alternative agreements, in that if a controller allows a choice of agreement, the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification increases monotonically as we move rightwards along the hierarchy. 14 Paciaroni, Tania & Loporcaro, Michele. 6 DAI: Loporcaro, Michele & Paciaroni, Tania & Pescarini, Diego & Idone, Alice & Romagnoli, Serena & Zanini, Chiara & Zakharko, Taras. Agreement is a pervasive phenomenon in many languages of the world ([4]: 1), the object of unrelenting typological work (e.g. [12]), and a constant preoccupation of linguists of all persuasions both in the functional-typological approach (e.g. [13]; [8]; [10]) and in the formalist camp (e.g. [1]; [16]; [2]; [9]; [18]). [Extracted from the article]

This study investigates region-specific inflectional morpheme frequencies within the ICNALE Corpus, exploring significant global linguistic intricacies. Through a quantitative, corpus-based approach, it conducts a comprehensive contrastive analysis, leveraging the extensive accessibility of the online ICNALE. Despite inherent limitations in data collection primarily reliant on interviews and written compositions within the ICNALE Corpus, the study offers illuminating insights into how diverse linguistic backgrounds influence the usage of inflectional morphemes in English. The findings bring to light interesting patterns in possessive usage, reflecting variations among ESL learners in acquiring grammatical features. Additionally, it highlights complexities in acquiring comparative and superlative degrees, aligning with challenges encountered by learners in mastering specific inflections. Analyses of plural noun inflections, subject-verb agreement, past tense, past participle, and present participle usage underscore the multifaceted influences of language background, acquisition stages, and instructional emphasis on learners' morphological patterns. Future inquiries could further investigate the impact of instructional methodologies on inflectional morpheme acquisition, undertake comparative studies across proficiency levels and age groups, explore morphological transfer from learners' native languages, and deepen comprehension of cognitive processes guiding effective learning strategies. These endeavors hold promise in refining pedagogical methodologies and enriching language learning experiences for diverse learner cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates knowledge of English verbal morphosyntax among multilingual students and their L1 Norwegian peers in grades 5–7 in Norway. L1 Norwegian speakers have previously shown transfer from Norwegian to verb placement or subject-verb agreement in L2 English, but their multilingual peers may have an advantage in acquiring these properties in L3 English due to their knowledge of other languages. A written test examining verb placement in verb-second (V2) contexts and subject-verb agreement was used to compare L1 Norwegian students with their multilingual peers, who spoke a variety of different L1s in the home. The results showed that the difference in mean scores alone was not significant between the L1 Norwegian group and the multilingual group, but when grade level and academic achievement were controlled for, linguistic group membership did significantly predict better performance by the multilingual group for some, but not all, grammatical conditions examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical genders have been addressed in many languages of the world. To present a comparative view, the present article provides a general investigation of Dutch and Kurdish grammatical genders by examining relevant data throughout the Dutch and Kurdish language. Most of the data of the present article focus on the structural management of the grammatical gender systems of the highlighted languages. Finally, the paper attempts to address some conclusions to show a range of closeness and farness among Dutch and Kurdish via similarities and differences between the grammatical gender systems of the stated languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study investigated the relationship between oral corrective feedback (OCF) and language learning anxiety in the acquisition of the regular past tense morpheme -ed and the subject-verb agreement morpheme –s in EFL. The participants were two Greek L1 eleven-year-old female twins at an A2 level of English language proficiency. A language anxiety test and interview data showed that one of the twins was a low-anxiety learner while the other was a high-anxiety learner. The teaching interventions lasted for two weeks, providing corrective feedback on the target structures during 8 oral story-retelling tasks. Results from pre-tests, immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests (which contained an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an oral imitation test) showed that the lowanxiety learner benefited from metalinguistic feedback whereas the high-anxiety learner benefited from recasts in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement. On the other hand, there was no statistically significant improvement in the acquisition of the past tense morpheme –ed. Our findings comply with previous studies which indicate that implicit OCF (recasts) may be more beneficial to high-anxiety learners, while explicit OCF (metalinguistic) may be more helpful for low-anxiety learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine the most prevalent African American Language (AAL) phonological and grammatical features in slavery- and Civil Rights–themed children's literature. Seventy-six books were initially selected to determine if they used AAL in dialogue or in narration. Of the 76 books, only 39 included AAL. The 39 books were analyzed further to categorize the specific AAL features used. The results revealed that the reduction of the final g (e.g., thinkin ') was the most prevalent phonological feature. Moreover, phonological features were used more often in slavery-themed texts than in Civil Rights texts. Additionally, the most frequently used AAL grammatical features were negation tense markers (e.g., didn't and neither) and subject-verb agreement (he listen). Grammatical features of AAL appeared more often in slavery-themed texts than Civil Rights themed texts. Implications for practice include suggestions for selecting, evaluating, and reading the books from this study with students. Implications for research include investigating other AAL features in slavery- and Civil Rights-themed books, authenticating the storylines of slavery- and Civil Rights–themed books, and analyzing other books with AAL that do not use these themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English has become the global lingua franca, facilitating communication across diverse nations. The reason for Filipinos to proficiently acquire and utilize English lies in its pivotal role in the nation's future development. This study investigated the reading interest and grammatical competence of first-year education students in one of the private schools in North Cotabato, Philippines. Employing a descriptive-correlational research design, the investigation delineates the respondents' demographic profile, encompassing parents' highest educational attainment and reading material preferences, both print and digital. Furthermore, it scrutinized disparities in reading interest and grammatical competence among students based on demographic profiles and explores the interplay between reading interest and grammatical competence. Findings highlights a noteworthy proclivity among first-year education students toward reading and a high level of grammatical competence. Particularly, mothers' highest educational attainment and access to printed materials exhibit significant correlations with reading interest and grammatical competence, particularly in verb tenses and subject-verb agreement. These findings underscore for ongoing teacher development initiatives aimed at fostering innovative pedagogical approaches that invigorate students' enthusiasm for English language acquisition and literary engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the extent to which working memory (WM) capacity and distance-based complexity influenced how second language (L2) learners used morphosyntactic information incrementally during online processing of L2 English long-distance subject-verb number agreement dependencies. The moving-window self-paced reading experiment involved 40 agreement-lacking first language (L1) Thai learners of English and 40 native English speakers. Distance-based complexity was manipulated based on whether the agreement controller and the agreeing verb were intervened by a short-distance subject-extracted relative clause or a long-distance object-extracted relative clause in line with the Dependency Locality Theory. The findings indicated that both native speakers and L2 learners experienced less processing difficulty in short-distance conditions, showing heightened sensitivity to agreement violations. Their sensitivity was, however, modulated as a function of distance-based complexity and WM capacity. The L2 learners' lack of sensitivity in the long-distance conditions was associated with their limited pool of cognitive resources. Consistent with the L1–L2 structural competition account, these findings suggest in relation to morphology learning in SLA that L2 learners may labor under parallel activation during crosslinguistic competition, whereby cognitive resources are insufficient to resolve long-distance agreement dependencies, thus resulting in reduced sensitivity to L2 morphosyntactic violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is aimed to examine the types of written subject verb agreement mistakes made by the students enrolled in BS English program. Second purpose of this study was to check mastering subject verb concord depends whether on language exposure or grip on language. There has been profound research on the reasons of mistakes made by students in subject verb agreement but none has touched upon what sort of mistakes students make mostly, particularly in University of kotli.A study at the University of Kotli has been conducted to examine the subject-verb agreement errors made by students in the BS 5th and BS 1st semesters. Researchers utilized essay writing as their research tool and adopted a qualitative research method. The study's findings indicate that the majority of errors, particularly omissions, were made by BS English 5th semester students. The proportion of students making omission errors is higher than those making misinformation errors, with addition errors being the least common. The results indicate that 5th semester students still struggle with subject-verb agreement, making more errors than 1st semester BS English students despite having more language exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the problems of low accuracy, recall rate, and F1 value of traditional English grammar error detection methods, a new machine translation model is constructed and applied to English grammar error detection. In the encoder-decoder framework, the machine translation model is constructed through the steps of word vector generation, encoder language model construction, decoder language model construction, word alignment, output module, and so on. On this basis, the machine translation model is trained to detect English grammatical errors through dependency analysis and alternative word generation. Experimental results show that the accuracy, recall rate, and F1 value of the proposed method are higher than those of the experimental comparison method for detecting English grammatical errors such as articles, prepositions, nouns, verbs, and subject-verb agreement, indicating that the proposed method is of high practical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra “I plays-3rd-person the guitar”) yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso “the journalist go-1st-person out often”). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study compares the performance of three machine translation tools in English-Arabic translation to answer the questions of (a) whether the three machine translation tools, Google Translate, Systran and Microsoft Bing can be ordered in a hierarchy of performance, and (b) whether they can handle lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences. Using a number of constructed and selected English sentences, the morphosyntactic features of number, gender, case, definiteness, and humanness, agreement between cardinal numerals and their head nouns, lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences are used to test the three machine translation tools for performance. The results show that (a) as far as handling the morphosyntactic features of subject-verb agreement in Standard Arabic, all three machine translation tools perform equally well, and no machine translation tool seems to perform significantly better than the other two (b) some marked features (e.g. dual number and humanness) of SA seem to pose some problems for machine translation tools, and (c) lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences seem to be the most challenging sentences for the three machine translation tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an attempt to investigate the scope and type of error in feedback effectiveness. This study consists of two experiments. One was conducted to investigate the feedback effects on a rule-based error type (i.e. subject–verb agreement errors) and the other was conducted to investigate the effects on a lexically-based error type (i.e. verb–noun collocation errors). In addition, the scope of error was investigated in both experiments. In terms of the rule-based error type, results for the immediate posttest writing task showed focused feedback to be effective for the narrowly defined subject–verb agreement errors (i.e. subject–verb agreement involving lexical verbs or copula be). In the delayed posttest writing task, the benefit still persisted for the narrowly defined subject–verb agreement errors. In terms of the lexically-based error type, results for the immediate posttest writing tasks showed focused feedback to be effective for the broadly defined verb–noun collocation errors (three or four collocation errors made and corrected in pretests). In the delayed posttest writing tasks, the benefit still persisted for the broadly defined verb–noun collocation errors broadly defined. These findings suggest that the notion of error type should influence the feedback effectiveness. Theoretical implications regarding the role of notice in the second language acquisition process were discussed based on the results obtained in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This quantitative study aimed to determine the effects of using a quasi-experimental method using pre-test - post-test with one group design was used in this study, which identified the scores of the students in four grammar area tests before and after the use of cooperative learning activities. The four areas were pronoun-antecedent agreement, subject-verb agreement, tenses of verbs, and voices of verbs. The students' mean pre-test and post-test scores were then compared to determine significant improvement in the student's competency. Cooperative learning activities were then constructed as research output. Findings show that prior to the use of cooperative learning activities, the student's competencies in three areas were found to be fair. These were on the pronounantecedent agreement, tenses of verbs, and voices of verbs. Only in the area of subject-verb agreement was the students' competency found to be poor. After the use of cooperative learning activities, the students' competencies were found to be satisfactory in all areas of the grammar test. There were significant differences in the mean pre-test and post-test scores of the students in all areas of the grammar test. The computed t-values imply significant improvement in the students' competencies after the use of cooperative learning activities. Conclusion and recommendations were given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In morphologically richer languages, including French, one must learn the specific properties of number agreement in order to understand the language, and this learning process continues into adolescence. This study examined similarities and differences between French-speaking adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) when processing number agreement, and investigated how morpho-syntactic regularity affected language processing. Using event-related potentials (ERP) and only grammatical sentences with audio-visual mismatches, we studied ERP correlates to three types of number agreement: (1) regular determiner agreement in noun phrases, (2) regular subject-verb plural liaison, and (3) irregular subject-verb agreement. We also included a lexico-semantic mismatch condition to investigate lexico-semantic processing in our participants. 17 adolescents with DLD (M = 14.1 years) and 20 (pre)teens with typical language (TL, M = 12.2 years) participated in the study. Our results suggest three patterns. First, French-speaking teenagers without DLD are still consolidating their neurocognitive processing of morpho-syntactic number agreement and generally display ERP profiles typical of lower language proficiency than adult native speakers. Second, differences in morphosyntactic processing between teenagers with and without DLD seem to be limited to rule-based (regular) number agreement. Third, there is little evidence for corresponding differences in lexico-semantic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The timing of corrective feedback (CF) provision has been a controversial issue in SLA research. Despite widespread research, there is still disagreement on whether the erroneous structures should be addressed immediately or at a delayed time after task completion. This study investigates the comparative effects of immediate and delayed feedback on developing subject-verb (s-v) agreement by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 28 university students were divided into immediate (n=14) and delayed (n=14) CF groups after the administration of the Oxford Placement Test. The study involved a pre-test, three treatment sessions and a posttest. The two feedback groups received treatments followed by either immediate feedback provided after task completion or delayed feedback delivered after 3 days of task completion. The tests and treatments contained various activities including multiplechoice, cloze, fill-in-the-blanks and picture description task. The results of the analysis of test scores on the pre- and post-tests were indicative of the outperformance of the immediate CF group, implying that the immediate feedback may be more beneficial for developing s-v agreement accuracy than delayed feedback. The findings of this investigation can bear efficient implications for language teachers and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the processing mechanisms of subject-verb agreement in Korean, which offers a distinctive landscape that encompasses both optional and required agreement components. We particularly focused on the attraction effect, by teasing a part of agreement relationships (optional vs. required). The findings in this study indicate that Korean honorific agreements might employ a distinct processing strategy, potentially resembling the active search strategy observed in other long-distance dependencies in Korean. Korean speakers appear to predict the presence of honorific markers for dependency resolution, even though honorific agreements are not obligatory in the language. This research provides new insights into the crosslinguistic variations in processing strategies for subject-verb agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The present study provides longitudinal data on the development of receptive and expressive grammar in children and adolescents with Down syndrome and addresses the role of nonverbal cognitive abilities and verbal short-term memory for morphosyntactic development. Method: Seventeen German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome (aged 4;6-17;1 years at first testing (T1)) were assessed twice, 4;4-6;6 years apart. For a subset of five participants, there was also a third assessment 2 years after the second. Receptive grammar, nonverbal cognition, and verbal short-term memory were tested using standardized measures. For expressive grammar, elicitation tasks were used to assess the production of subject-verb agreement and of wh-questions. Results: At group level, the participants showed a significant increase in grammar comprehension from T1 to T2. However, progress diminished with increasing chronological age. Notable growth could not be observed beyond the age of 10 years. With respect to expressive grammatical abilities, progress was limited to those participants who had mastered verbal agreement inflection around age 10 years. Individuals who did not master verbal agreement by late childhood achieved no progress in producing wh-questions, either. There was an increase in nonverbal cognitive abilities in the majority of participants. Results for verbal short-term memory followed a similar pattern as those for grammar comprehension. Finally, neither nonverbal cognition nor verbal short-term memory were related to changes in receptive or expressive grammar. Discussion: The results point to a slowdown in the acquisition of receptive grammar which starts before the teenage years. For expressive grammar, improvement in wh-question production only occurred in individuals with good performance in subject-verb agreement marking, which suggests that the latter might have a trigger function for further grammatical development in German- speaking individuals with Down syndrome. The study provides no indication that nonverbal cognitive abilities or verbal short-term memory performance determined the receptive or expressive development. The results lead to clinical implications for language therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of attraction effects, whereby a verb erroneously retrieves a syntactically inaccessible but feature-matching noun, is a type of grammatical illusions (Phillips, Wagers, and Lau 2011) that can occur in long-distance subject-verb agreement in human sentence processing (Wagers et al. 2009). In contrast, reflexive-antecedent dependencies have been claimed to lack attraction effects when the reflexive and the antecedent mismatch (Dillon et al. 2013). Yet, some other studies have shown that attraction effects have been observed in reflexive-antecedent dependencies, when the number of feature mismatch between the reflexive and the antecedent increases (Parker and Philips 2017). These findings suggest that there are different cue weightings based on the predictability of the dependency, and these cues are combined according to different cue-combination scheme, such as a linear or a non-linear cue-combination rule (Parker 2019). These linguistic phenomena can be used to analyze how linguistic features are accessed and combined within the internal states of Deep Neural Network (DNN) language models. In the linguistic representations of BERT (Devlin et al. 2018), one of the pre-trained DNN language models, various types of linguistic information are encoded in each layer (Jawahar et al. 2019) and combined while passing through the layers. By measuring the performance of Masked Language Model (MLM), this study finds that both subject-verb agreement and reflexive-antecedent dependencies show attraction effects and follow the linear-combinatoric rule in BERT. The different results from human sentence processing suggest that the self-attention mechanism of BERT may not be able to capture the differences in the predictability of the dependency as effectively as memory retrieval mechanisms in humans. These findings have important implications for developing more understandable and interpretable explainable-AI (xAI) systems that better capture the complexities of human language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish 3rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number. Following earlier findings which indicate that Turkish heritage speakers (HS) accept overt plural marking more readily compared to monolingually raised Turkish speakers, the present study investigates to what extent bilingual speakers are sensitive to grammatical, surface-level and semantic constraints on Turkish plural agreement marking. A scalar acceptability judgement task was carried out with non-bilingual Turkish speakers residing in Turkey and Turkish-German bilinguals residing in Germany. Our experimental design involved manipulating both subject animacy and subject position. Participants' judgement patterns confirmed Turkish speakers' general preference for unmarked verb forms, which was modulated both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between lower proficiency HS on the one hand, and monolinguals and advanced proficiency HS on the other, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between different types of constraint on number agreement marking is affected by heritage language conditions. We found no evidence for simplification or optionality reduction in the lower proficiency HS' judgements, however. We innovate on previous research by using Gradient Symbolic Computation modelling to capture between-group differences in the relative weightings of the constraints under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study seeks to investigate the effectiveness of collaborative Zoom breakout rooms discussion in eliminating subject-verb agreement difficulties encountered by Palestinian English majors. The quasi-experimental approach was adopted. To explain, an intact class consisting of 30 freshmen English majors were exposed to a pre-posttest focusing on subject-verb agreement. For intervention, the participants were put into Zoom breakout rooms in small heterogenous groups to discuss the subject-verb agreement rules and to practice related exercises collaboratively. Google documents were used to provide exercises and instructions. The result showed that the participants' scores in the posttest outperformed the results of the pretest. The statistically recorded positive result confirmed the effectiveness of the collaborative Zoom breakout rooms discussion on eliminating subject-verb agreement difficulties encountered by Palestinian English majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates an impromptu writing task administered to diploma students studying in one of the technical universities on the East Coast of Malaysia. In particular, it identifies grammatical errors in one-paragraph writing in terms of overall errors, most errors and least errors. The samples were 49 students undergoing the Preliminary Semester taking English as one of the subjects in the particular semester. The study found that students made errors to a certain degree in using articles, tenses, and subject-verb agreement (SVA), among others. More specifically, the highest number of errors students made were in tenses, SVA, and word choices, while the least errors were in possessive and attributive structures, gerunds, and infinitives. The results indicate that assigning students impromptu writing contributed to their performance errors. Despite their low vocabulary knowledge, it also made them less expressive when writing under such conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Koptjevskaja-Tamm points out, the division of labor between the elative and the partitive case in partitive constructions largely corresponds to the distinction between partitive nominal constructions (elative) and pseudo-partitive constructions (partitive), as shown in Figure 2 (from [50]: 533). 2.2 Partitive elements Partitive constructions may also develop into "faded" partitives, a term introduced by [51] to indicate seemingly partitive constructions in which, however, there is only a vague hint to a possible part-whole relation, as discussed in De Hoop ([34]: 193-206; see also [75]). As observed in Section 1, the term "partitive", "partitives" has been used with different meanings, comprising partitive and pseudo-partitive constructions, faded partitives and indefinite or "generalized" partitives. Section 3.2.2 is devoted to so-called "generalized" partitives, i.e. partitive cases, partitive genitives, partitive articles that express notions other than partivity, such as indefiniteness or unboundedness. Partitive constructions and their developments In this section we present some basic notions related to partitivity, focusing on types of constructions connected with the notion of part/whole relation, i.e. the partitive nominal construction, or "proper partitive", and the pseudo-partitive construction (Section 2.1). [Extracted from the article]

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It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were...). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals' susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals' judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language, Interaction & Acquisition / Langage, Interaction et Acquisition is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)