Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

The study investigates the effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on thought organisation, and syntactic complexity in the written production in a group of fifty 11-year-old children (M = 10.7) enrolled in 5th and 6th grades in a bilingual school in the south of Brazil. The children's home and community language is Portuguese, and they have been…

The diversity of vulnerability conditions, that have prevented children and adolescents from exercising their right to school education, also produces a diversity of cultural references of the public that comes to Basic Education programs for Youth and Adults in developing countries. This diversity often forges appropriation processes of numeracy…

Purpose: This study investigated prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) and tested the absolute boundary hypothesis and the relative boundary hypothesis. Processing speed was also investigated. Method: Fifteen children with NH and 13 children with…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing…

This study tests native Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of second language (L2) Spanish in the domain of phonologically null object pronouns. This is a worthwhile first language (L1)-L2 pairing given that these languages are historically and typologically related and both seemingly allow for object drop. Nevertheless, the underlying syntax of…

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…

Taking an experiential approach to language development, this article links gaming to the language development of a 10-year-old deaf child under speech therapy. Specifically, it examines face-to-face interactions between mediators and the child, during 1 year of gaming in clinical encounters. To do so, it codes data by means of interactional…

This paper examines several previously-unexplained aspects of verbal morphology and syntax in Madija, an Arauan languages spoken in Peru and Brazil. These include the distribution of an auxiliary verb that occurs with some predicates but not with others and the factors that determine the choice among three different affixes marking third person…

Deals with knowledge of scalar transformations among Brazilian students and construction foremen. Compares students' mathematical experience to foremen's. Reports study on students' and foremen's performance in solving scale drawing problems. Discusses aspects of relationship between learning mathematical procedures in school and daily life and…

Examines the spontaneous speech of Portuguese-speaking two-year olds in natural conversation with Portuguese-speaking adults. The children were separated into three groups based on Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLUW). The children in the highest-MLUW group almost perfectly matched the adult speakers on every measure. (37 references)…

These issues include the following articles: "Portuguese Philology in Brazil" (Heitor Megale, Cesar Nardelli Cambraia); "Implications of Brazilian Portuguese Data for Current Controversies in Phonetics: Towards Sharpening Articulatory Phonology" (Eleonora Cavalconte Albano); "Morphological Studies in Brazil: Data and…

English translations of articles in French in this issue include these: "Discourse Reported in the Print Media"; "Comparison of Register in Quebec and French Speakers"; "Method of Description of Specialized Verbs in View of Machine Translation Applications"; "Dialectal Areas in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande…