The study examines whether speakers exaggerate prosodic cues to syntactic structure when addressing young children. In four experiments, 72 mothers and 48 non-mothers addressed either real 2-4-year old or imaginary children as well as adult confederates using syntactically ambiguous sentences like "Touch the cat with the spoon" intending to convey…

Much recent research has described the development of innovative functions of "like" as a discourse marker ("'Like' they're trying to be discreet about it") or discourse particle ("Maybe it's 'like' a girl thing") and as a quotative marker ("He's 'like' 'I don't want to work until later'"). Comparatively little is known about how speakers acquire…

To what extent do bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information? According to Hartsuiker et al. (2004) [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). "Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals." "Psychological Science," 15,…

Interaction research about the role of language production in second language (L2) development has focused largely on modified output, specifically learners' responses to negative feedback (Iwashita, 2001; Loewen & Philp, in press; Mackey & Philp, 1998; McDonough, 2005; McDonough & Mackey, in press; Nobuyoshi & Ellis, 1993; Pica, 1988; Shehadeh,…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…