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.

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.

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 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.