Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or…

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…

The current study investigated the possibility that language switches could be relatively automatically triggered by context. "Single-word switches," in which bilinguals switched languages on a single word in midsentence and then immediately switched back, were contrasted with more complete "whole-language switches," in which…

In the current study we explored lexical, syntactic, and semantic processes during text comprehension in English monolinguals and Spanish/English (first language/second language) bilinguals with different experience in interpreting (nontrained bilinguals, interpreting students and professional interpreters). The participants performed an…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

Describes a study of "analogy" and "interference" errors in the syntax of second language learners. (Author/RM)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

Focuses on the learner's problems in producing the correct grammatical gender for a given noun in German. Discusses the complexity of gender assignment and the lengthy process of acquisition of gender. Examines error patterns made by English students of German. (Author/LMO)

This study analyzed the grammatical features of two classes of words in Japanese, adjectives and adjectival nouns. Both have functions similar to those of English adjectives, but their behaviors differ syntactically or morphologically from each other. Differences in psychological processes, evident in both lexical retrieval processes and native…