Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

For Spanish nouns, masculine gender is unmarked and feminine is marked. Effects of markedness on gender agreement processing are inconsistent, possibly owing to differences between online methods. This study presents a reanalysis of eye-tracking data from Keating's (2022) study on the processing of noun-adjective gender agreement in speakers of…

Can brief training on novel grammatical morphemes influence visual processing of nonlinguistic stimuli? If so, how deep is this effect? Here, an experimental group learned two novel morphemes highlighting the familiar concept of transitivity in sentences; a control group was exposed to the same input but with the novel morphemes used…

Contending with talker variability has been found to lead to processing costs but also benefits by focusing learners on invariant properties of the signal, indicating that talker variability acts as a desirable difficulty. That is, talker variability may lead to initial costs followed by long-term benefits for retention and generalization. Adult…

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an…

The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun…

This study extended an existing crosslinguistic model of verb-marking errors in children's early multiword speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations showed that the resulting model not only provides a better…

Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit,…

This study investigated how much practice is necessary for learners to attain durable second language (L2) grammar knowledge. Using digital flashcards, 119 participants practiced translating 12 sentences into an artificial language, followed by feedback, until they had typed all sentences correctly. Participants repeated this activity in one, two,…

Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and…

This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

In this exploratory study, we considered the method of combining event-related potentials (ERPs) and source attributions as a means for examining the explicit or implicit nature of second language (L2) knowledge and processing. We recorded electroencephalograms while L2 Spanish participants judged phrase structure and subject-verb agreement…