The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…

Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

Preposition knowledge is important for academic success. The goal of this project was to examine how different variables such as English input and output, Spanish preposition score, mother education level, and age of English exposure (AoEE) may have played a role in children's preposition knowledge in English. 148 Spanish-English children between…

Reading comprehension in L2 has been shown to be correlated to vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. However, little is known about the relative contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge in this language competence. In the present study we investigated the contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge of some particular grammatical elements to the…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we…

This study explored noun and verb retrieval using a sentence completion task to expand upon previous findings from picture naming tasks. Participants completed sentences missing either a target noun or verb in the final position. Non-target responses were coded for substitution type, imageability and frequency. Like picture naming, nouns and verbs…

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the…

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which…

Verbs are one of the basic building blocks of grammar, yet few studies have examined the grammatical, morphological, and phonological factors contributing to lexical access and production of Spanish verb inflection. This report describes an online data set that incorporates psycholinguistic dimensions for 50 of the most common early-acquired…