The present study compared Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals within three age groups to examine whether bilinguals have an advantage in syntactic processing. Participants were tested on morphosyntactic awareness, word-order awareness, artificial syntax learning, and general cognitive abilities. Bilinguals within the three age…

This dissertation presents the judgment of what is 'correct' American Sign Language (ASL) structure by the younger generation, using the word order strategies that were used in older generation signers, as well as younger generation attitudes towards the ideology of ASL being a SOV language. This study used an on-line survey to evaluate 83…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…

Three studies test the link between word order in binomials and psychological and demographic characteristics of a speaker. While linguists have already suggested that psychological, cultural and societal factors are important in choosing word order in binomials, the vast majority of relevant research was focused on general factors and on broadly…

Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., "the dog chased the cat"). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., "that's the dog that chased…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…