It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

When elderly (70-89 years) and younger (30-49 years) adults imitated complex sentences, younger adults were more able to imitate accurately and correctly paraphrase sentences regardless of length, position, or type of embedded clause. Elderly adults were unable to imitate or paraphrase correctly long constructions, suggesting an age-related…

Study of native speakers of Yoruba who spoke English as a second language found that transfer of learning from one language to the other decreased with increasing proficiency in English. Transfer from Yoruba to English was higher than from English to Yoruba at lower levels of proficiency in English. (Author/CB)