While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [??] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [?] tends to occur in syllable onset…

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children.…

This study compared the effectiveness of balanced and skewed input at facilitating the acquisition of the transitive construction in Esperanto, characterized by the accusative suffix "-n" and variable word order (SVO, OVS). Thai university students (N = 98) listened to 24 sentences under skewed (one noun with high token frequency) or…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

This study investigates the differential effects of language attrition in two diverse linguistic domains: verb placement and object expression. Linguistic phenomena at the syntax--discourse interface, such as object expression, have been shown to be more vulnerable to attrition than narrow syntax properties, such as verb placement. This study aims…

Two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (3-5-year-olds, 6-8-year-olds) participated in a picture identification task and a picture naming task in both languages. Results revealed age-related growth in English, but not Mandarin vocabulary. Composite vocabulary was larger than either single-language vocabulary in the younger children but…

Previous language learning research reveals that the statistical properties of the input offer sufficient information to allow listeners to segment words from fluent speech in an artificial language. The current pair of studies uses a natural language to test the ecological validity of these findings and to determine whether a listener's language…

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…

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

Examined how a bilingual child might come to an understanding of the existence of two languages in terms of pragmatic differentiation and lexical differentiation. Using data from a Portuguese-English bilingual child, showed that the child exhibited evidence of pragmatic differentiation before lexical differentiation. (Author/VWL)

Examines language transfer or interference from the perspective of the input the bilingual child is exposed to. Argues that transfer occurs in those domains of the grammar where the language learner is confronted with ambiguous input. (Author/VWL)

Examined potential effects of early exposure to sign language on the use of communicative gestures by a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents. Data were analyzed to identify types and tokens of communicative gestures, words, signs, and the ways in which they were combined. (Author/VWL)

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher…