Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that "bamoule" means "penguin" and "pirdaling" means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Investigates the discourse coherence of school-aged children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with SLI were found to be significantly impaired in the areas of topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed. (Author/ER)

This study argues that positive second-language (L2) data do not necessarily rule out inappropriate L2 grammar. Rather, L2 learners appear to postulate first-language (L1) grammar as an interim theory about the L2, at least in the initial stages of L2 acquisition. The case where L2 grammar intersects L1 concerning time adverbial clauses was chosen…