Anaphora / Binding

relationship between anaphors and antecedents

Argument Structure

relationship between verb and arguments - including applicatives, benefactives, causatives, passives, transitivity, unaccusatives, unergatives

Aspect

marking of duration or type of temporal activity denoted by verb, including telicity

Child-Directed Speech - Lexical and Syntactic Cues

characteristics of infant-directed and child-directed speech relevant to lexical and syntactic acquisition - including definitions, expansions, explanations, labeling, lexical frequency, lexical specificity, negative evidence (explicit and implicit), questions, recast, repetition, sentence frames, topic contingency, turn-taking, word order

Child-Directed Speech - Phonetic and Segmentation Cues

characteristics of infant-directed and child-directed speech relevant to segmentation and phoneme acquisition - including acoustic properties, articulation, distributional regularities, facial and head movements, phoneme frequency, phonetic contrasts, prosodic properties, sound patterns, speech rate

Clitics

process of cliticization, nominal and verbal clitics

Code Switching

use of two or more languages within one sentence or stretch of discourse, linguistic constraints on switching, language preference in bilinguals

Complementizer Phrase

phenomena involving the Complementizer Phrase, e.g. WH questions, complementizers, V2 structures

Computational Modeling

testing acquisition patterns using a computational model

Constructivist / Usage-Based Approaches

constructivist or usage-based approach to language learning

Determiner Phrase

phenomena occurring in the Determiner Phrase, e.g. articles, demonstratives, possessives, quantifiers, noun phrases

Discourse – Formal/Generative

formal approaches to dependencies and contingency relations between utterances – including anaphora, cohesion, inter-sentential connectivity, reference

Discourse Non-Generative

non-formal approaches to dependencies and contingency relations between utterances - including anaphora, cohesion, conversational abilities, discourse markers, inter-sentential connectivity, reference

Gesture

pointing, iconic and metaphoric gestures, coordination between gesture and speech

Instruction and Classroom Interaction

effect of instructional methods on language learning , effect of classroom interaction on language learning (e.g. correction, feedback, input frequency, recast), effect of schooling on language behaviour, effect of L1 use on language learning in L2 class

Language Socialization

using language for social purposes – including honorifics, humour, ingroup / outgroup distinctions, morality, politeness, register, social identity, teasing, turn-taking

Language-Cognition Dissociation

is there dissociation between language abilities and cognitive abilities, especially in various types of language disorders?

Language-Conceptualization Interface

linguistic relativity (effect of language structure on attention to conceptual distinctions and vice versa), ordering of conceptual understanding vs. acquisition of lexical item (i.e. does conceptual understanding in a domain precede lexical acquisition in that domain, or vice versa, or are both simultaneous?), relationship between problem-solving skills and language development

Lexical Access and Retrieval

retrieval of words from mental lexicon, structure of information in mental lexicon

Lexical Semantics

semantic features of words, prototypes of lexical categories, semantic networks, order of acquisition of words / word types in a lexical class on the basis of semantic factors

Literacy and Reading

relationship between oral / signed language and reading  / writing / spelling ability, determinants of literacy development, effect of book reading on language development, development of academic language, role of context in deriving meaning from text, role of phonlogical / morphological / syntactic awareness in learning to read, role of articulation and auditory processing in reading ability

Morphology - Formal/Generative

generative analysis of word structure - including agreement, case, classifiers, diminutives, gender, plurals, tense, verbal/nominal inflections

Morphology -
Non-Generative

non-generative analysis of word structure - including agreement, case, classifiers, diminutives, gender, plurals, tense, verbal/nominal inflections

Motion Events and Spatial Language

language pertaining to motion events and spatial relations, including manner, path, goal, source, containment, support, prepositions of location

Movement Phenomena

movement processes (or checking / indexing processes) - including questions, raising, scrambling, subjacency, topicalization

Narrative

personal narrative, story narrative, story retelling

Negation

processes and constructions related to negation

Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Mechanisms

relationship between brain activation and language acquisition (e.g. MEG, EEG, ERP, fMRI), effect of brain injury on language, executive attention, memory, inhibition

Nominal Morphology

classifiers, case markers, determiners, possessives

Null Arguments

null subjects, null objects

Optimality Theory

use of methods or concepts from Optimality Theory

Optional or Root Infinitive

optional use of (root) infinitive forms

Phonetics

characteristics of human speech sounds - including clusters, epenthesis, phonotactics, rhyming, sonority, voice onset time, voicing, vowel harmony. vowel height

Phonology - Formal/Generative

generative or formal analysis of the sound system of language - including clusters, epenthesis, phonotactics, rhyming, sonority, voice onset time, voicing, vowel harmony

Phonology -
Non-Generative

generative or formal analysis of the sound system of language - including accent, clusters, epenthesis, phonotactics, rhyming, sonority, voice onset time, voicing, vowel harmony

Pragmatics - Formal/Generative

formal encoding of aspects of language use - including deixis, focus, implicatures, presupposition, reference

Pragmatics -
Non-Formal

aspects of language use with focus on interaction between users - including communicative competence, communicative intent, deixis, focus, implicature, new/given, presupposition, reference, refusals, requests, speech acts

Prosody

variations in accent, intonation, pitch, rhythm, tone

Semantics - Formal/Generative

formally construed aspects of meaning - including definiteness, entailment, evidentials, partitives, polarity, quantification, scope, specificity

Semantics -
Non-Formal
Generative

general aspects of meaning - including lexical semantics, metaphor, polysemy, word meaning

Sentence Processing

relationship between encoding and production of syntax and morphology, ambiguity resolution, garden path sentences, reaction time

Social Factors

effect of social factors on language learning – including ethnicity, exposure to schooling, gender, SES

Statistical Learning

acquisition of a (rule-governed) aspect of language as a result of unconscious attention to distributional regularities in the input

Syntax -
Formal/Generative

generative approaches to sentence structure - including agreement, anaphora, argument realization, benefactives, binding, classifiers, clitics, control, determiners, ellipsis, empty categories, finiteness, movement phenomena, negation, passives, phrase structure, possession, preposition stranding, psych predicates, questions, raising, relative clauses, scrambling, subjacency, tense, topicalization, word order

Syntax -
Non-Formal Generative

non-generative approaches to sentence structure - including agreement, anaphora, argument realization, benefactives, classifiers, clitics, determiners, ellipsis, finiteness, negation, passives, phrase structure, possession, preposition stranding, questions, relative clauses, tense, topicalization, word order

Theory of Mind

understanding of the thoughts of others - including appearance/reality distinction, degree of certainty (e.g. know vs. think), false belief, mental state verbs, pretense, unexpected contents

Verbal Morphology

agreement, finiteness, tense

Word Learning with Attentional Cues

mapping from form to meaning using attentional cues such as gaze, gesture, joint attention, labelling, pointing, sensitivity to speaker knowledge

Word Learning with Conceptual Cues

mapping from form to meaning using conceptual and semantic cues such as animacy, categorization, constraints (e.g. mutual exclusivity, shape bias, whole object, taxonomic), imageability, individuation, referent familiarity

Word Learning with Perceptual Cues

mapping from form to meaning using perceptual and phonetic cues such as acoustic cues, affect, perceptual sensitivity, phonetic contrast, pitch, pronunciation accuracy, segmentation, speech rate, transitional probabilities

Word Learning with Syntactic Cues

mapping from form to meaning using syntactic and morphological cues such as sentence frames, syntactic bootstrapping, verbal/nominal inflection