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 study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2…

The current project investigates developmental aspects of acquiring locative verb constructions in English as a second language. Locative verbs, such as "to pour," "to spill," "to spray," and "to sprinkle," constitute a prototypical case of an overgeneralization problem in language learning: Whereas some of…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar.…

An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated…

According to the linguistic theory of "natural order," eight English morphemes have been ranked in an invariant order of difficulty for learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Pedagogical implications of this theory have led to the "natural approach" as a comprehensive second language teaching methodology. A case study that suggests the…

Papers on applied linguistics and language pedagogy include: "A Genre Analysis Study of 80 Medical Abstracts" (Kenneth Anderson, Joan Maclean); "Oral Classroom Testing in an Adult French Community Class" (Sheena Davies, Aileen Irvine, Jacqueline Larrieu); "Whose Relevance? Interpretation of Hybrid Texts by a Multiple…