The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and…

The present study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language pairing, Polish-Spanish. Specifically, a Spanish group (N = 28) and a Sequential child bilingual (N = 22) and a Simultaneous bilingual (N = 8) group living in Misiones, Argentina, completed three experimental…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

Evidence of learning following incidental exposure has been found for aspects of nonnative syntax in adults (Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008). However, little research has tested delayed effects of learning under an incidental condition or moved beyond word order. This study investigated learning of third…

This study examines the acquisition of the featural constraints on clitic and null distribution in Spanish among simultaneous and sequential Chinese-Spanish bilinguals from Peru. A truth value judgment task targeted the referential meaning of null objects in a negation context. Objects were elicited via two clitic elicitation tasks that targeted…

This study assessed knowledge of numerically quantified English sentences in two learner populations--second language (L2) learners and deaf learners--whose acquisition of English occurs under conditions of restricted access to the target language input. Under the experimental test conditions, interlanguage parallels were predicted to arise from…

This study tested the predictions of the revised hierarchical (RHM) and morphological decomposition (MDM) models with Arabic-English bilinguals. The RHM (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) predicts that the amount of activation of first language translation equivalents is negatively correlated with second language (L2) proficiency. The MDM (Frost, Forster, &…

Previous studies have shown that it is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to overcome the effects of transfer when they need to unlearn specific aspects of the native language in the absence of explicit input that indicates which properties of the first language (L1) are ruled out by the L2 grammar (Inagaki, 2001;…