This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input-probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam &…

Providing evidence for the universal tendencies of patterns in the world's languages can be difficult, as it is impossible to sample all possible languages, and linguistic samples are subject to interpretation. However, experimental techniques, such as artificial grammar learning paradigms, make it possible to uncover the psychological reality of…

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models.…

This article analyses the styles of English produced by an adult migrant who started to speak the language later in life, and it approaches them from the perspective of quantitative style-shifting and discursive stylization. After defining style and the procedures needed to justify the term "L2," the study describes the focal informant's…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated…

Three experiments compared the assignment of gender to masculine and feminine pictured objects as classified by Spanish grammatical gender, by English- and Spanish-speaking children, and by adults. Results revealed artificial-male/natural female conceptual division among speakers of English and delayed effects of grammatical gender among speakers…

Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 controls participated in a study testing sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. Participants with L/LD performed significantly below the comparison group, suggesting that this skill is problematic…

Three issues of concern in language acquisition are discussed: (1) apparent attrition of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) by puberty; (2) observable differences among second-language learners with respect to LAD efficiency; and (3) whether explicit rules of grammar can become part of linguistic competence. (42 references) (Author/MSE)

The language spoken to young children is described and shown to constitute a special speech style. (GO)

Misinterpretations of the logical subject of infinitives by second language learners and prelingually deaf adults are compared with children's extension of the minimal distance principle during acquisition of infinitive complement structures and other research studies. Later acquisition of certain structure is explained in terms of the sentences'…

This study evaluated regular and irregular verb class distinctions in the language of two adults with severe congenital physical impairments who relied on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Limited evidence for distinction between the two verb classes was found. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. (DB)