An ongoing issue of interest in second language research concerns what transfers from a speaker's first language to their second. For learners of a sign language, gesture is a potential substrate for transfer. Our study provides a novel test of gestural production by eliciting silent gesture from novices in a controlled environment. We focus on spatial relationships, which in sign languages are represented in a very iconic way using the hands, and which one might therefore predict to be easy for adult learners to acquire. However, a previous study by Marshall and Morgan (2015) revealed that this was only partly the case: in a task that required them to express the relative locations of objects, hearing adult learners of British Sign Language (BSL) could represent objects' locations and orientations correctly, but had difficulty selecting the correct handshapes to represent the objects themselves. If hearing adults are indeed drawing upon their gestural resources when learning sign languages, then their difficulties may have stemmed from their having in manual gesture only a limited repertoire of handshapes to draw upon, or, alternatively, from having too broad a repertoire. If the first hypothesis is correct, the challenge for learners is to extend their handshape repertoire, but if the second is correct, the challenge is instead to narrow down to the handshapes appropriate for that particular sign language. 30 sign-naïve hearing adults were tested on Marshall and Morgan's task. All used some handshapes that were different from those used by native BSL signers and learners, and the set of handshapes used by the group as a whole was larger than that employed by native signers and learners. Our findings suggest that a key challenge when learning to express locative relations might be reducing from a very large set of gestural resources, rather than supplementing a restricted one, in order to converge on the conventionalized classifier system that forms part of the grammar of the language being learned.

4This study contributes original results to the topical issue of the degree to which 5 grammar is intact in high-functioning children with autism (HFA). We examine the 6 comprehension of binding and obligatory control in 26 HFA children, mean age=12;02, 7 compared with two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children: one matched 8 on non-verbal mental age (MA), mean age=9;09, and the other on verbal MA, mean 9 age=8;09. On the binding task, our HFA group showed a good performance on 10 reflexives on a par with TD matched children, in line with recent reports of intact 11 knowledge of reflexive binding in higher but not lower-functioning children with autism. 12Their comprehension of personal pronouns was somewhat poorer, with no difference 13 observed between the groups, again supporting the existing literature. Results on the 14 control task, which probed mastery of syntactic relations never previously examined 15 in autism, revealed that both HFA children and the two matched TD groups were at 16 ceiling on single-complement subject control (try) and object control (persuade). 17However, a considerably poorer attainment on double-complement subject control 18 (promise) was present equally in the HFA group and the verbal MA-matched TD group 19 but not in the non-verbal MA-matched group. Performance on promise correlated with 20 age only in the verbal MA-matched group, whilst in HFA it correlated with general 21 cognitive and language abilities. 22These novel findings demonstrate that regular obligatory control and reflexive binding 23 are preserved in HFA. We contrast these results with previous literature that has 24 demonstrated deficiencies with passives and raising in HFA populations. The 25 emerging bifurcation suggests different analyses for the principles underlying these 26 constructions: whereas the latter incorporate movement, control and binding do not. 27The poor performance on promise supports all previous literature on this lexically and 28 syntactically idiosyncratic construction. Its breaking of locality, which in turn results in 29 a conflict between lexical and syntactic requirements, is exceptional and introduces 30 an extra step of learning. This step appears to be related to maturation in TD children, 31 and to stronger language and cognitive skills in HFA children. 32 33

We argue that English allows both rightward descending VP-shell structures and more traditional rightward ascending VPs. The choice between these depends on case theory and economy. Case theory triggers VP-shell formation whenever the verb is merged with a DP-object after it has been merged with some other category. The reason is that VP-shell formation allows verb and object to surface in adjacent positions, a prerequisite for case licensing in English. Economy has the effect that in all other circumstances, VP-shell formation is blocked. Our argument is based on range of intricate data, many of which involving the distribution of object-oriented floating quantifiers. We end with a discussion of the binding data that are often taken to support a uniformly descending structure, incorrectly in our view.

This study examined discourse effects on obligatory and non-obligatory control interpretations. Seventy participants undertook three online forced-choice surveys, which monitored preferred interpretations in complement control, verbal gerund subject control, long-distance control and sentence-final temporal adjunct control. Survey 1 ascertained their baseline interpretations of the empty category in these constructions. Survey 2 primed the critical sentences used in survey 1 with a weakly established topic of discourse and survey 3 primed them with a strongly established one. Reference assignment in complement control remained consistent across all three conditions, illustrating that pragmatics does not infiltrate this structurally regulated and syntactically unambiguous construction. Changes in interpretation were found in the remaining three constructions. An accessibility-motivated scale of influence, combining three independent discourse factors (topichood, competition and linear distance) was created to model reference determination in verbal gerund subject control and long-distance control. The results for temporal adjunct control are novel. They revealed a much stronger susceptibility to pragmatic interference than that reported in the literature yet the construction behaved differently from non-obligatory control under discourse pressure. We propose a structural account for sentence-final temporal adjunct control, which permits the evident interpretation shift while still excluding arbitrary and sentence-external interpretations.

Difficulties with communication are one of the defining characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whereas language abilities vary. Language, however, encompasses a vast array of knowledge. Lexical knowledge includes, for example, the ability to comprehend and produce a single vocabulary item, such as the verb kick. To learn this word, the language-learning child must categorize it as a verb and work out its meaning (e.g., to strike out with a foot). If she wishes to use this verb to refer to a past event, this requires morphological knowledge, such that as a regular verb, it takes the suffix -ed in the past tense. However, to use this word in a sentence, the child must also understand its syntactic properties. Kick, for example, needs an object, as well as a subject. This rudimentary syntactic knowledge will prevent her from producing illicit sentences such as "*Kicked the ball" or "*He kicked" yet permit "He kicked the ball." On the basis of these simple examples, language appears to use literal knowledge and a predictable rule-based set of skills. However, if we return to the simple declarative, "He kicked the ball," we can see that a listener cannot lean on any aspect of linguistic knowledge mentioned so far to establish the reference of the pronoun. Lexical and morphological knowledge indicate that a singular male subject is intended, but that is all, and syntactic knowledge does not contribute anything in this respect. To recover the pronoun's reference (i.e., its antecedent), attendance to the context in which the sentence is uttered is required. When people go beyond so-called computational components of language to work out who is being referred to, they are using pragmatic knowledge. This pragmatic skill enables them to choose a referent based on the degree of context provided. Sometimes the referent will be unequivocally linked to one antecedent (perhaps only one person has been mentioned in the preceding discourse), but on other occasions, several possible referents might be available so the listener must make a decision, somehow attributing the contenders with different weights in terms of the likelihood of their being the intended referent.The current study taps precisely into this skill. We compare examples of language (shown in examples 1 and 2 below), that might be expected to cause children with ASD difficulty. The difficulty is anticipated because the sentences call on either quite advanced syntactic knowledge, as in (1), or syntactic and pragmatic knowledge, as in (2), to work out who is being referred to in the bracketed clause.(1) and (2), for example, comprise a main clause and an embedded clause that lacks an overt subject. Additionally, (2) requires the use of contextual knowledge