Research indicates that linguistic input from teachers may affect child vocabulary development in preschool and beyond (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001). Currently, there is little research on the relationship between specific teacher language use in individual interactions on child language outcomes for preschool children at risk for academic delays.…

This study looks at the relationship between L1 (Russian) attrition and L1 reading ability in Russian-English-speaking bilingual children. Ten Russian-English bilingual children and 10 adults participated in this study. Nine out of 10 children participants were born in the US and used L1 as their primary language of interaction within the family,…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…

Aim: The aim of this study was to compare spoken language production in children with permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) whose PCHI was confirmed either early or late. Method: Audio-taped spoken narrative was assessed for syntax, phonology, morphology, and narrative in transcripts from a population-based sample of 89 children (49 males,…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

Researchers have long debated the mechanisms underlying the learning of syntactic structure. Of significant interest has been the fact that passive constructions appear to be learned earlier in Sesotho than English. This paper provides a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the passive input Sesotho-speaking children hear, how it differs from…

While L1 transfer and L2 learnability have been studied extensively in the domain of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, purely semantic phenomena have received little attention in the L2 literature. This paper presents two experiments examining the relative scope assigned to disjunction and negation by English-speaking learners of Japanese…

This article reports the results of a study of potential sources of item nonequivalence between English and Chinese language versions of a cognitive development test for preschool-aged children. Items were flagged for potential nonequivalence through statistical and judgment-based procedures, and the relationship between flag status and item…

This paper addresses the issue of whether negative sentences containing auxiliary "do" in L1 and L2 English share the same underlying syntactic representation. To this end, I compare the negative sentences produced by 77 bilingual (Spanish/Basque) L2 learners of English with the corresponding data available for L1 acquirers reported on in Schutze…

One of the most widely spoken languages of the world, Bahasa Indonesia (BI), became standardized as the official language of Indonesia. Based on Malay, it served as lingua franca in various forms throughout the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Although BI has been habitually learned as a second language, the number of native speakers of BI…

This study examines the role of transfer from English in the acquisition of double-que questions in Spanish among 17 heritage speakers in the US. Results from an elicited production task, an acceptability judgment task and a preference task revealed significant difficulties in the production and acceptability of double-"que" questions. In contrast…

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the "second…

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of…

While syntactic reanalysis has been extensively investigated in psycholinguistics, comparatively little is known about reanalysis in the semantic domain. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to keep track of semantic processes involved in understanding short narratives such as "The girl was writing a letter when her friend spilled coffee…

This study presents results from a sentence completion test that examines the production of finite main clauses and non-finite relative clauses in Turkish agrammatic speech. In main clauses, the verb is finite and all its constituents are in their base positions. In relative clauses, the verb is a participle and the NP undergoes overt movement to…