The congruency effect--that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…

The aim of this study is twofold: To examine if deafness is invariably associated with deficits in executive function (EF) and to investigate the relationship between sign language proficiency and EF in deaf children of deaf parents with early exposure to a sign language. It is also the first study of EF in children acquiring Polish Sign Language.…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

Due to the varying aspects of the bilingual experience and the use of numerous subjective and objective measures across studies, bilingual individuals are often described and grouped differently. We examined the relationship among two subjective and one objective English proficiency measures in spoken and written modalities in 64 bilingual young…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

This article reports on a study whose aim was to analyze the relation between the level of declarative purism and the preference for a particular loanword adaptation technique. Evidence from many languages shows that language purists accept foreign words more readily if they are in a native disguise; as a consequence, they choose adaptation…

Vulnerability of morphosyntactic production, including grammatical aspect, has been identified in at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to typologically different languages. However, Tovar et al. (2015) found strengths in comprehending grammatical aspect in English-exposed children with ASD, suggesting that the…

It is said that children are amazing at acquiring their first language (L1); by the time they reach school age, they are using complex grammar and demonstrating a wide vocabulary. Even more impressive, these young learners might show up at school with two languages in their toolbox or add a second language (L2) with far less effort than older…

Using a lexical decision task, Wolter and Yamashita (2015) showed that collocations that exist only in L1 but not in L2 were not processed faster than collocations that only exist in L2 but not in L1 or a random combination of two words. This result seems to support the age/order of acquisition effects (Carroll & White, 1973) over Jiang's…

While formal L3 morphosyntactic acquisition research has focused on the roles of the L1 versus L2 during the L3 initial stages, we examine their roles during development. Specifically, we explore whether the L3 (here, Portuguese) revision process after non-facilitative transfer differs whether the initial L3 representation reflects the L1 or L2.…

The present dissertation analyzed speech production and perception in early heritage Spanish-English bilingual children. Specifically, I investigated how perception and production of lexical stress develops in bilingual children. Current models of second language (L2) speech perception do not include heritage bilinguals or suprasegmental aspects…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

The benefits of task-based interaction in Second Language Learning (SLL) have been made increasingly evident in the literature. However, unlike adult studies, only recently has interaction research on EFL children grown in popularity. Most children-based research has focused primarily on Negotiation of Meaning, while other age-related aspects,…