Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Investigates the effects of Spanish-English bilinguals' first-language syntactic knowledge on the guesses they make about the meanings of new words encountered in English contexts. Examines a particular type of transfer to understand the process of vocabulary acquisition in second-language readers. (48 references) (Author/CK)

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…