The late-acquired French subjunctive–indicative contrast conveys important information about event realization and is characterized by bound morphology, form ambiguity, contextual restrictedness, and the infrequency of the subjunctive. This study contributes underrepresented adverbial-clause interpretation data and incorporates lexical effects to extend what is known about why French mood is late-acquired. We assess interpretation of four adverbial conjunctions which primarily co-occur with subjunctive or indicative mood in corpus searches. Analysis of 77 participants revealed a statistically significant interaction between mood and proficiency, with more proficient learners affected by mood, whereas clause order influenced less proficient learners. Moreover, lower-proficiency learners treated adverbs within a particular class of co-occurrence more similarly across the 32 items than our advanced learners or native speakers, who were sensitive to lexical effects, attributable to the roles of frequency and semantics. The study contributes to the growing body of research on late-acquired structures, for which learners attend to evolving cues across acquisitional trajectories.

This article investigates speakers’ attitudes towards the use of anglicisms in Quebec French, particularly verbs. The common practice in Quebec French is to morphologically integrate these anglicisms into the French language (e.g., il m'a ghosté). However, in recent years, some French-speaking Quebecers have been using the unintegrated forms (e.g., il m'a ghost). This change of practice for the use of English-origin verbs is a linguistic innovation that is emerging from young French speakers in the Montreal area (M-E Bouchard 2023a). To investigate attitudes towards the use of anglicisms (integrated and non-integrated forms), 675 French-speaking Quebecers were asked the following open-ended question: Do you have anything to say about the use of anglicisms in Quebec French? The current study consists of a qualitative analysis of the participants’ answers to this specific question. This study has found evidence of linguistic hierarchies between the use of anglicisms that are morphologically integrated and those that are not. The anglicisms that are not morphologically integrated into the French language are perceived by many participants as incorrect and as challenging communication and understanding between users and non-users of the unintegrated forms. Participants associate the use of the unintegrated forms with young people.

Non-word repetition (NWR) is often utilized for the assessment of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and as a clinical marker for language-related disorders. In this study, associations between children's language competence and their performance in language-specific NWR tasks as well as the relevance of NWR for the prediction of language development were scrutinized. German preschoolers (N = 1,801) were compared regarding their performance in NWR, German vocabulary, and articulation. For 141 children, results of a school enrolment test were available. Multilingual children performed as well as monolingual German-speaking children in NWR only under the condition of comparable German language skills. NWR performance depended on item length, children's vocabulary and articulation skills and was weakly associated with language-related medical issues. The predictive power of NWR for children's performance in the school enrolment test was minimal. To conclude, chosen German-based NWR tasks did not deliver convincing results as a clinical marker or predictor of language development.

This article provides the first formal account of empirical generalizations concerning the adaptation of Japanese vowels in Truku, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. It is shown that while most Truku native markedness constraints are respected in loanword adaptation, two of the language's markedness constraints are sacrificed to satisfy loanword-sensitive faithfulness constraints and one is blocked only in unaffixed loanwords, exhibiting a derived environment effect. Other than native phonology, perceptual saliency is also shown to play a role in loanword adaptation, as evidenced by the different adaptation behaviors between voiced and voiceless vowels and between peripheral and mid vowels. The fact that both perception and native phonology play roles in vowel adaptation in Truku loanwords thus supports the Perception-Phonology Approach of loanword adaptation, a perception-oriented theory that involves the native phonology.

This article investigates the observation that the object of obligatorily transitive verbs in Jordanian Arabic cannot drop in VSO clauses but can in SVO clauses as long as its referent is already mentioned in the previous discourse of an accompanying utterance. When object drop takes place, the subject of the accompanying clause should be a [+definite] or [+specific] element. This article provides an account of this generalization, based on the topic nature of the subject and the object, their structural positions in the high and low peripheries and the effect of relativized minimality in ruling out movement of one over the other.

This article describes the compilation of three new spoken language corpora designed to address the acquisition of variation and change in English by second language (L2) learners. The first corpus represents L2 English recorded from native Canadian francophones in the Canadian National Capital Region. A second corpus of vernacular English recorded from native anglophones in the same region furnishes a local baseline variety of the target language (TL). A third corpus of local Canadian French represents L2 speakers’ first language (L1). These corpora are used to determine the extent to which L2 variable patterns approximate those in the TL. Comparison of L2 variable features with structural analogues in speakers’ L1, French, additionally affords a window on possible L1 transfer effects. We present a case study exploring the L2 acquisition of quotative variation and change in the local TL benchmark variety. Results point to the close approximation of higher-proficiency L2 speakers to TL community norms, challenging the prevailing notion that L2 acquisition typically involves incomplete mastery of TL patterns and constraints.