We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

With Chinese native-speaker data as the baseline, this study investigates the use of the morphosyntactic particle DE by learners of Chinese as a second language. The general patterns are as follows: (a) DE tends to be deleted more in informal speech than in formal settings; (b) higher proficiency and longer residence in China--more interactions…

The study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the adjective marker "-de"(ADJ) in Chinese. It explores the interaction between processing constraints as represented in processability theory (Pienemann, 1998) and the learner's categorial analysis of Chinese adjectives and stative verbs which cross-categorize in the acquisition…

All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language…