Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…

Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

We tested 12- and 18-month-old English-learning infants on a preferential-looking task which contrasted grammatically correct sentences using the determiner "the" vs. three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was substituted by another English function word, a nonsense word, or omitted. Our design involved strict controls…

Reading comprehension is based on the efficient accomplishment of several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level. To the extent that each of these processes contributes to reading comprehension, it can cause reading difficulties if it is deficient. To identify individual sources of reading difficulties, tools are required that…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…