The paper presents the first comprehensive look at the language development of Romani-speaking children from resource-poor Roma communities in several European countries. 250 participants aged 3- to 10-years participated. The experimental tasks assess knowledge in eight key areas of grammar and morphology, including fast mapping of novel items.…

In this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. Several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. A final and overall evaluation…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., "bw greater than bd greater than lb"; Greenberg 1978). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we…

Researchers who assume that Universal Grammar (UG) plays a role in second language (L2) acquisition are still debating whether L2 learners have access to UG in its entirety (the Full Access hypothesis; e.g. Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994; 1996; White, 1989; 2003) or only to those aspects of UG that are instantiated in their first language (L1) grammar…