In the 1950s, the assessment and management of children with language impairments emphasized their auditory and visual processing deficits and relied heavily on classifications of adult language disorders. Many compelling theoretical insights were offered, but research in language acquisition was in its infancy. It was not until the 1960s and…

In her Keynote Article, Paradis reviews evidence from bilingual language development to assess the claims of two opposing theoretical views of language disorders. Specifically, she examines the evidence for similarities in language profiles of typically developing (TD) sequential bilingual (second language [L2]) children and monolingual children…

The papers in this special issue of "Language and Cognitive Processing" on the neural bases of language production illustrate two general approaches in current cognitive neuroscience. One approach focuses on investigating cognitive issues, making use of the logic of associations/dissociations or the logic of neural markers as key investigative…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

Many second language acquisition (SLA) studies have traditionally limited their scope of investigation to the description and analysis of errors in L2 learners' use of multiword units. Recently, researchers have begun to approach this topic from a psycholinguistic perspective, examining the processing of multiword units by L2 learners. However,…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as "the key to the cabinets", with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as "the keys to the cabinet", where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are…

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what…

I commend Johanne Paradis not only for her interesting Keynote Article but also for the careful research that she has conducted along with her collaborators in the area of bilingual language development and disorders. Her contributions have been significant and are sure to shape our theoretical as well as clinical understanding of specific…

Language is proposed to have developed atop the human analog of the macaque mirror neuron system for action perception and production [Arbib M.A. 2005. From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics (with commentaries and author's response). "Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28", 105-167; Arbib…

This study examines the storage versus composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants…

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first…

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic. The nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production. The central empirical questions revolve around properties of "exchange errors". These…

Daily conversations contain many repetitions of identical and similar word forms. For bilinguals, the words can even come from the same or different languages. How do such repetitions affect the human word recognition system? The Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model provides a theoretical and computational framework for understanding…

In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…