This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

This study investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory (WM) mediate the effects of captions with or without textual enhancement on attentional allocation and L2 grammatical development, and whether L2 development is influenced by WM memory in the absence of captions. We employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest…

Deficits in working memory (WM) have been reported repeatedly in children with primary language impairment (PLI) and may significantly contribute to the language difficulties that are experienced by these children. However, interventional studies within the field regarding the cross-domain effects between working memory and language are limited,…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun…

This study investigated whether the role of working memory capacity varies over the course of second language (L2) morphosyntactic development. Eighty-seven beginning, intermediate, and advanced university L2 Spanish learners completed two nonverbal tasks measuring executive function (EF) and phonological working memory (PWM) in their native…