Children's understanding of the temporal terms "first," "before," and "after" has implications for describing experienced events, but has typically been studied by asking them to interpret described events. In this study, one hundred and one 3- to 6-year-olds completed two tasks. In the description task, children…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and…

We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…

Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that these languages share syntactic representations. Muylle et al. (2020a) found similar priming of transitives and ditransitives between Dutch (SVO order)…

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…

This study is aimed to re-examine the Interface Hypothesis via investigating the adult L2 acquisition of the word order variation of numeral classifier indefinites at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces in L2 Chinese. A computerized acceptability judgment task was administered to 41 advanced and intermediate adult Korean learners…

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N = 40), five-year-olds (N = 58), and…

We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking…