We investigate the production of subject and object "who"- and "which"-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that…

This study explores the possibility of cross-language activation when bilinguals process number words in their first language (Italian) and their second language (German). Italian monolinguals (Experiment 1), German monolinguals (Experiment 2), and Italian/German bilinguals (Experiment 3) were required to decide the larger of two number words…

This study aimed to investigate cognate/noncognate processing distinctions in young adult bilinguals and examined whether the previously reported cognate facilitation effect would also be demonstrated in older adult bilinguals. Two groups of Italian-English bilingual participants performed lexical decisions in repetition priming experiments.…

Canadian English-Italian bilingual children were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. Results suggest English-Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing but may influence other linguistic modules. Exposure to a language with more predictable…

Investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragamatics from the perspectives of functional constraints on sentence processing. Findings reveal that native speakers of Italian first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that…