It is widely attested that university students face considerable difficulties with reasoning in analysis, especially when dealing with statements involving two different quantifiers. We focus in this paper on a specific mistake which appears in proofs where one applies twice or more a statement of the kind "for all X, there exists Y such that R(X,…

From some psycholinguistic perspectives, this study examines language transfer by exploring the nature of the multilingual mental lexicon in relation to sources of language transfer. It assumes that the multilingual mental lexicon contains not only lexemes but also language-specific lemmas; language-specific lemmas may activate language-specific…

This study investigates the presence and latency of the P600 component in response to subject-verb agreement violations in spoken language in people with and without developmental dyslexia. The two groups performed at-ceiling level on judging the sentences on their grammaticality, but the ERP data revealed subtle differences between them. The P600…

It is a matter of debate whether the two differentiated grammatical systems in a bilingual child develop autonomously, or whether there is interdependence and in what areas (Genesee, 2001; Meisel, 2001). Extensive research is being carried out in the emergence of the two grammars, but not much attention has been given to the development of…

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher…

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime…

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed…

This study was designed to explore a model of communicative competence (Abbeduto & Nuccio, 1989) and identify whether its components could (a) predict pragmatic language difficulties for children with emotional or behavioral disorders (E/BD) and (b) describe the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language ability as well as the social skills of…

One of the major issues related to teaching an introductory programming course is the excessive amount of time spent on the language's syntax, which leaves little time for developing skills in program design and solution creativity. The wide variation in the students' backgrounds, coupled with the traditional classroom (one size-fits-all) teaching…

In this study, we assessed and analyzed 5th grade students' levels of syntactic awareness in relation to their reading fluency and comprehension. The aim was to examine the role of syntactic awareness (children's awareness of the syntactic structure of sentences and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure) as a potential source…

This paper presents an exploratory study on cross-linguistic interference among indigenous Kechwa-Spanish bilingual children (n=30) living in a language contact situation. Its preliminary findings show evidence of cross-linguistic interference between Kechwa desiderative progressive forms such as miku-naya-yka-n (eat-desprog-3) "S/he wants to/is…

Down syndrome is the most prevalent cause of intellectual impairment associated with a genetic anomaly, in this case, trisomy of chromosome 21. It affects both physical and cognitive development and produces a characteristic phenotype, although affected individuals vary considerably with respect to severity of specific impairments. Studies…

Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by a microdeletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23, is associated with mild to moderate intellectual disability or learning difficulties. Most individuals with Williams syndrome evidence a cognitive profile including relative strengths in verbal short-term memory and language, and…

The point of departure of this study is the well-known hypothesis according to which structures that involve the syntax-pragmatics interface and instantiate a surface overlap between two languages are more vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence than purely syntactic domains (e.g. Muller and Hulk, 2001). In exploring the validity of this…

It has been argued that extended exposure to naturalistic input provides L2 learners with more of an opportunity to converge of target morphosyntactic competence as compared to classroom-only environments, given that the former provide more positive evidence of less salient linguistic properties than the latter (e.g., Isabelli 2004). Implicitly,…