The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

Conventional wisdom holds that children learn languages implicitly whereas older learners learn languages explicitly, and some have claimed that after puberty only explicit language learning is possible. However, older learners often receive more explicit instruction than child L2 learners, which may affect their learning strategies. This study…

This study compares the development of three different types of bilingual/second language children in their acquisition of gender-marking on adjectives in Dutch to investigate whether there is evidence for age-of-onset effects in early childhood as proposed by Meisel (2009). The three groups of children are: simultaneous bilingual children,…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

English uses three types of generic NPs: bare plurals ("Lions are dangerous"), definite singulars ("The lion is dangerous"), and indefinite singulars ("A lion is dangerous"). These three NP types are not interchangeable: definite singulars and bare plurals can have generic reference at the NP-level, while indefinite singulars are compatible only…

Coupling a review of previous studies on the acquisition of grammatical aspects undertaken from contrasting paradigmatic views of second language acquisition (SLA) with new experimental data from L2 Portuguese, the present study contributes to this specific literature as well as general debates in L2 epistemology. We tested 31 adult English…

In this article I provide evidence that despite frequently cited differences between child first language (L1) and adult second language (L2) speakers in overt behavior (performance) during grammatical development, the nature, source, and limits of implicit knowledge (competence) in native and second language grammars are equivalent (i.e., they…