In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…

Situated within second language (L2) research about the acquisition of morphosyntax, this study investigated English L2 speakers' detection and primed production of a novel construction with morphological and structural features. We report on two experiments with Thai (n = 69) and Farsi (n = 70) English L2 speakers, respectively, carried out an…

Much previous research has pointed to the need for a unified framework for language contact phenomena -- one that would include social factors and motivations, structural factors and linguistic constraints, and psycholinguistic factors involved in processes of language processing and production. While Contact Linguistics has devoted a great deal…

Second language (L2) researchers are becoming more interested in both L2 learners' knowledge of the target language and how that knowledge is put to use during real-time language processing. Researchers are therefore beginning to see the importance of combining traditional L2 research methods with those that capture the moment-by-moment…

Purpose: Evidence for tense marking in child-directed speech varies both across languages (Guasti, 2002; Legate & Yang, 2007) and across speakers of a single language (Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, 2011). The purpose of this study was to understand how parent interaction styles and register use overlap with the tense-marking…

A significant problem in computational language learning is that of inferring the content of well-formedness constraints from input data. In this article, we approach the constraint induction problem as the gradual adjustment of subsymbolic constraints in a connectionist network. In particular, we develop a multi-layer feed-forward network that…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

Young English-speaking children often omit auxiliary verbs from their speech, producing utterances such as "baby crying" alongside the more adult-like "baby is crying." Studies have found that children's proficiency with auxiliary BE is correlated with frequency statistics in the input, leading some researchers to argue that…

Purpose: Nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence imitation (SI) are increasingly used as diagnostic tools for the identification of Primary Language Impairment (PLI). They may be particularly promising diagnostic tools for bilingual children if performance on them is not highly affected by bilingual exposure. Two studies were conducted which…

Research into dual-modality theory has long rested on the assumption that presenting input in two modalities leads to better learning outcomes. However, this may not always hold true. This study explored the possible advantages of using dual modality in repeated reading--a pedagogy often used to enhance reading development--for two literacy…

In this study, the prototype of a new type of bilingual picture book was field-tested with two sets of mother-son subject pairs. This picture book was designed as a possible tool for providing children with comprehensible input during their critical period for second language acquisition. Context is provided by visual cues and both Japanese and…

Duration-based auditory grouping preferences are presumably shaped by language experience in adults and infants, unlike intensity-based grouping that is governed by a universal bias of a loud-soft preference. It has been proposed that duration-based rhythmic grouping preferences develop as a function of native language phrasal prosody.…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

This study addressed the potential methodological issues effect of attentional condition on subsequent vocabulary development from a different perspective, which addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research that have been based on psycholinguistic notion of second language learner as a limited capacity processor. The…

Home language literacy education in Australia has been pursued predominantly through Community Language Schools. At present, some 1,000 of these, attended by over 100,000 school-age children, cater for 69 of the over 300 languages spoken in Australia. Despite good intentions, these schools face a number of challenges. For instance, children may…