This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

This study investigates the use of overt and null subjects in Bulgarian in child heritage speakers with L2 German. The alternation of overt and null pronominal subjects in null-subject languages like Bulgarian depends on grammatical and discourse conditions and contrasts with German. Oral narratives were elicited in Bulgarian, comparing the…

Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

This dissertation explores subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Palenquero Spanish (PL Spanish) and Palenquero Creole (PL Creole), two languages that have coexisted for centuries in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), share most of their lexicon, but differ in their grammar. Crucially, this study investigates how the contact between them and the…

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded "wh"-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

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…

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they…

Whereas Standard Dutch only distinguishes between two adnominal grammatical genders, substandard varieties of Belgian Dutch distinguish between three such genders. German, too, distinguishes between three genders. Nevertheless, when assigning gender to German nouns with Dutch cognates, speakers of Belgian Dutch are strongly influenced by Standard…

In response to shifting sociocultural constructions of gender and the emerging visibility of non-binary subject positions, grammatically binary linguistic systems, such as French, are being challenged, subverted, and adapted. This paper describes and analyzes formal, structural, and ideological aspects of how contemporary French speakers are…

The research explores forms and function of variant tag questions (VTQs) in the native and non-native Englishes. For the said purpose, patterns of VTQs in Pakistani English are compared with two native (British and New Zealand) and two non-native (Indian and Singaporean) varieties. The components of the "International Corpus of English,"…

Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…