This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

In two studies we investigated 2-year-old children's answers to predicate-focus questions depending on the preceding context. Children were presented with a successive series of short video clips showing transitive actions (e.g., frog washing duck) in which either the action (action-new) or the patient (patient-new) was the changing, and therefore…

Three studies that examine the development of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual children K-2. In the first study, monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well on a complex task requiring phoneme substitution. The second replicated these results and demonstrated a significant role for the language of literacy…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) analyze the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners in off-line and on-line tasks and compare their performance with that of adult monolinguals. They conclude that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing (the contiguity assumption), with…

This study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. Kindergarten and second-grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. Results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to…