Visual input enhancement (VIE) increases the salience of grammatical forms, potentially facilitating acquisition through attention mechanisms. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing four linguistic cues (verb agreement, case marking, animacy, word order), with morphological cues either unmarked, marked in the…

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n = 68) and adults (n = 19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed…

The effects of 3 factors with reputed control over the word-order options allowed by English grammar (animacy, word length, and prosody) were studied in recall and judgment tasks performed by 850 undergraduates in 7 experiments. Findings suggest a preeminent role of conceptual factors in word order. (SLD)

The comprehension processing strategies of 15 monolingual English and 8 bilingual French native speakers were compared with those of 112 second-language learners of French, using stimuli containing word order and clitic pronoun cues in French. Results indicated differential dependence on cue use by native speakers. (Contains 97 references.)…