This study examined the role of child cognitive abilities for procedural and declarative learning in the earliest stages of second language (L2) exposure. In the context of a computer game, 53 first language Italian monolingual children were aurally trained in a novel miniature language over 3 consecutive days. A mixed effects model analysis of…

A hallmark of grammatical knowledge is the ability to parse novel syntactic structures. Previous artificial language studies have examined learning hierarchical structures, but few have involved meaningful language and shown generalization to novel structures. This study addressed this issue using the semiartificial language paradigm. The…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

Because of less exposure to either language, bilingual children's language acquisition can be delayed relative to monolingual children in domains related to input frequency. This study predicted that the acquisition of gender agreement with adjectives in French would be delayed in bilingual children on a picture description task. The results…

This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10)…

Investigated how adult learners of English-as-a-Second- Language (ESL) process sentences containing verbs that are temporarily ambiguous in interpretation between a main verb and a reduced relative clause. Seventeen Chinese, 17 Korean or Japanese, and 17 Romance learners with advanced ESL proficiency and a comparison group of 17 monolingual native…