One of the central questions in recent second language processing research is whether the types of parsing heuristics and linguistic resources adult L2 learners compute during online processing are qualitatively similar or different from those used by native speakers of the target language. While the current L2 processing literature provides…

Babcok et al. (2012) claim that Paradis (1994, 2004, 2009) argues that the reliance of late L2 learners on L1 neurocognitive mechanisms increases over time across both lexical and grammatical functions, namely for lexical items as well as rule-governed grammatical procedures, when in fact one can find repeated statements to the contrary in the…

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English-French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented…

Negation is a unique and fascinating property of human language which has been given extensive theoretical and typological treatment. One categorization divides negation use into metalinguistic negation and descriptive negation (Horn, 1985). Descriptive negation (DN) is the truth-functional semantic operator which has received the most attention…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

Purpose: The authors studied the effect of the cochlear implant (CI) on language comprehension and production in deaf children who had received a CI in the 2nd year of life. Method: The authors evaluated lexical and morphosyntactic skills in comprehension and production in 17 Italian children who are deaf (M = 54 months of age) with a CI and in 2…

Research on the production of subject-verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the…

Purpose: Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of…

This article investigates the effect of age of first exposure and the quantity and quality of input to which non-native acquirers (L2ers) are exposed in their acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Data from 103 English-speaking children, preteens and adults were analyzed for gender agreement on definite determiners. It was observed that…

A number of universities offer fully web-based language courses. Many others are considering this option. Yet it remains unclear whether web-based courses can be as comprehensively effective as classroom-based courses. And, if so, what might an effective web-based language course look like? This dissertation considers the German Online at PSU…

This research explores if poor grammaticality judgments of late (age of arrival greater than or equal to 12) second language learners often attributed to being beyond the critical period for language acquisition can be better explained by processing difficulties due to (1) low L2 working memory capacity, (2) poor L2 decoding, and/or (3) inadequate…

Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English and Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native acquirers of English were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested…

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6;8, 8;6 and 10;10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and…