This paper examines the relationship of age factor to second language acquisition. Age as an affective factor brings about different performance stages in second as well as first language learning. Traditionally, research in Critical Period Hypothesis and other variables has derived two major aspects of language learning--the younger = the better…

An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated…

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme.…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of "The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories" (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility…

Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif, bdif, lbif). Of interest is whether…

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutor's previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities.…

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds…

In order to test the hypothesis that closeness to the listener's native language is a determining factor when identifying stuttering in an unfamiliar language, three panels of different linguistic background were asked to make judgements of stuttering in a sample of Dutch speakers. It was found that a panel speaking Dutch and a panel speaking…

The use of social vs. cognitive approaches to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) has engendered considerable debate in the field. For instance, the recent "Modern Language Journal" Focus Issue (Lafford, 2007a) reviewed the ongoing debate between scholars espousing socially- and cognitively-grounded approaches to SLA research and…

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of "estar" that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalan,…

This study explored learning and generalization of parts of the Russian case-marking paradigm, an inflecting-fusional system in which affixes simultaneously mark several grammatical features (case, gender, number, animacy). In Experiment 1, adult English speakers (N = 43) were exposed to nouns with transparent gender marking in the nominative case…

Children from bilingual backgrounds are sometimes overidentified with language impairment (LI) because educators do not have appropriate developmental expectations. At other times bilingual children are underidentified because educators wait to identify difficulties while children learn the second language. In this review we discuss data on…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…