This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9-2;10 and 2;3-3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring…

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children's (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents' use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child's use of inflectional affixes and their…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Studies on L1- and L2-acquisition of German and Dutch have shown that the particles "too/also" and "again" hamper the realization of finiteness while the particle "not" promotes it. In this study the authors ask whether adversative "but" also affects the realization of finiteness. By applying a…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…