I provide an update on the state of the art of the research--the last one being Collentine (2003)--on the acquisition of the function of the subjunctive and mood selection, as well as the research's implications for pedagogy. The article considers what we currently know about the role of universal grammar, psycholinguistic perspectives on the…

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the…

Research on the acquisition of Spanish's two copulas, "ser" and "estar," provides an understanding of the interaction among syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and vocabulary during development (e.g., Geeslin, 2003a, 2003b; Gunterman, 1992; Ryan & Lafford, 1992). Recent research suggests that linguistic features in the surrounding discourse…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…

The present study investigates the syntactic competence of bilingual Portuguese-German returnees who have lost regular contact with their L2 (German). The main criterion which distinguishes the participants is the age of input loss. This allows their division into two main groups: speakers who lost German input during early childhood (between ages…

In several domains of psychology it has been shown that mood influences the way in which we process information. So far, little is known about the relation between mood and processes of language comprehension. In the present study we explore, whether, and if so how, mood affects the processing of syntactic anomalies in real time by recording…

This study considers the acquisition of the verb movement parameter in L3 English by adult Arabic-French bilinguals. The focus is on the nature of the L3 initial state and the contribution of the syntactic (C[subscript HL]) and post-syntactic (phonetic form) modules to the process of parameter resetting. The results of acceptability judgement…

In this article, we present a study that tests the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006) at the syntax-pragmatics interface and its possible extension to the syntax-morphology interface in two groups of first language (L1) speakers of Shipibo with different levels of formal instruction in Spanish as a second language (L2). Shipibo is a…

There are several major questions in the literature on late second language (L2) learning and processing. Some of these questions include: Can late L2 learners process an L2 in a native-like way? What is the nature of the differences in L2 processing among L2 learners at different levels of L2 proficiency? In this article, we review studies that…

Investigating spatial cognition in individuals with acquired language impairments can inform our understanding of how components of language are involved in spatial representation. Using the reorientation paradigm of Hermer-Vazquez, Spelke, and Katsnelson (1999), we examined spatial cue integration (landmark-geometry conjunctions) in individuals…

Previous studies using judgments of morphosyntactic errors have shown mixed evidence for a critical period for L2 acquisition (e.g., Birdsong & Molis, Journal of Memory and Language 44: 235-249, 2001, Johnson & Newport, Cognitive Psychology 21: 60-99, 1989). This study uses anomalies in the domain of information structure, the interface…

Natural language poses several challenges to developing computational systems for modeling it. Natural language is not a precise problem but is rather ridden with a number of uncertainties in the form of either alternate words or interpretations. Furthermore, natural language is a generative system where the problem size is potentially infinite.…

Despite longstanding arguments concerning the grammatical categories, functions, and status of the Korean and Japanese copulas within each language system, hardly any attention has been given to their comparative study. Researchers have asked about the function and status of the variant forms of the Japanese copula, and whether they should be…

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what one is searching for, he/she can come across web pages, blogs, and other content in many other languages. To deal with this multilingualism, various free…

All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are--at least…