Preschoolers' understanding that an object can be accurately described using two different non-synonymous words was investigated using a task in which children (N=36) had to judge which of two animals had provided correct adjectival labels for a series of pictures. For some pictures, only one animal provided a correct adjective, for some both…

Prior research indicates that category labels influence category judgments, but little is known regarding the effects for familiar categories with significant social consequences. The present studies address this issue by examining the effect of linguistic form on judgments of illnesses. Both mental and physical illnesses were presented in each of…

Assessing whether domain-general mechanisms could account for language acquisition requires determining whether statistical regularities among surface cues in child directed speech (CDS) are sufficient for inducing deep syntactic and semantic structure. This paper reports a case study on the relation between pronoun usage in CDS, on the one hand,…

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine…

The medieval period -- roughly the 1,000 years from the classical Greco-Roman age to the Renaissance and modern era -- has long been neglected in the history of psychology. Various reasons have been offered for why this period is treated so lightly, for example, that it was a Dark Age, or that it was dominated by anti-intellectual Christian…

The processing of Prepositional compounds (typical Neo-latin noun-noun modifications where a head noun is modified by a prepositional phrase, e.g., mulino a vento, windmill) was preliminarily studied with a group of six agrammatic aphasic patients, and, in more detail, with a further agrammatic patient (MB). Omission was the most frequent error…

Janssen and Caramazza (2003) show that when producing diminutives or plurals in Dutch, determiner information about the corresponding (singular) base form is active. This is reflected in a time cost for producing the plural or the diminutive with a gender-marked determiner when these forms and the corresponding singular or base form require…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Moroccan Arabic speakers in order to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and its interaction with Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other hand.…

This dissertation project examines the language contact situation of Chipilo, a Veneto-Spanish bilingual community of immigrant origin in central Mexico, focusing both on the social motivations for the sustained bilingualism observed and the linguistic outcomes in the Spanish of the community. Chipilo is a unique community in that Veneto, a…

The role of explicit information (EI) as an independent variable in instructed SLA is largely underresearched. Using the framework of processing instruction, however, a series of offline studies has found no effect for EI (e.g., Benati, 2004; Sanz & Morgan-Short, 2004; VanPatten & Oikkenon, 1996). Fernandez (2008) presented two online experiments…

The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the linguistic forms used by adolescents in electronic mail (e-mail) differ from those used in standard written language. The study was conducted in French, a language with a deep orthography that has strict, addressee-dependent rules for using second person personal pronouns (unfamiliar…

This paper describes how a new classroom environment instrument, the "Chinese Language Classroom Environment Inventory (CLCEI)", was developed to investigate the nature of Chinese language classroom learning environments in Singapore secondary schools. The CLCEI is a bilingual instrument (English and Chinese Language) with 48 items…

Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing "terminological cultures". This was found to be substantially…

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such…

This paper reports the results of an elicited production task of Long Distance (LD) "wh"-questions conducted with typically developing French- and Dutch-speaking children aged four and six, and adult control groups for each language. It is shown that besides input-convergent "wh"-questions, in both languages children use nontarget strategies to…