Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their…

Understanding the place of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) is crucial for an understanding of how acquisition occurs. Considerable work has been done on this topic, but nearly all of it assumes a highly non-modular view, according to which language and its development is "nothing special". As this assumption runs…

Young children are able to categorize animals on the basis of unobservable features such as shared biological properties (e.g., bones). For the most part, children learn about these properties through explicit verbalizations from others. The present study examined how such input impacts children's learning about the properties of categories. In a…

In this article, we challenge the notion that aptitude--operationalized as grammatical sensitivity as measured by the Words in Sentences section of the Modern Language Aptitude Test--is central to adult second language (L2) acquisition. We present the findings of a study on the acquisition of two properties of Japanese, head-final word order and…

This dissertation investigates the knowledge of English non-finite complement constructions by near-native L1 Spanish/L2 English learners. In particular, this study concerns Object Control, Raising to Object, and "for"-type constructions. Although the three constructions look identical on the surface, they are in fact distinct syntactic…

The current study used growth curve analysis to study the role of input during the acquisition of the English causal connective "because" and its German counterpart "weil." The corpora of five German and five English children and their adult caretakers (age range 0;10-4;3) were analyzed for the amount as well as for the type of…

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., running), others more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., ascending). Prior research has demonstrated that children and adults have lexicalization biases;…

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This thesis describes a Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) which, like other categorial grammars,…

This study aims at exploring the potential of extensive TV viewing for L2 vocabulary learning, and the effects associated with the language of the on-screen text (L1 or L2), type of instruction (pre-teaching target items or not) and learners' proficiency. A total of 106 secondary school students (Grade 8) divided into 4 classes participated in a…

The grammatical gender of German nouns continues to pose a challenge to second language learners. Following from a connectionist framework, this study explores the effect of two input enhancement techniques, color-coding and gendered actors, on the learning of grammatical gender by beginning learners of German during a vocabulary acquisition…

English writing is regarded as the most difficult task by Chinese EFL learners. Due to the existing problems in present college English writing instruction, teachers fail to provide effective guidance in students' writing process and students report a low level of motivation and confidence in writing tasks. Through purposeful reading discussions…

Phonological decoding, defined here as converting the written forms of words (or letter strings) into the phonological forms they represent, has been argued to play an important role in various aspects of L2 learning. Previous studies have emphasised the importance of transfer in L2 decoding, interpretable as the automatic triggering of L1-based…

The present study investigated the comparison between short and long-term effectiveness of input-providing and output-prompting negotiation strategies on mastering the target structures. To this end, the participants were divided into three groups, namely two experimental groups who had a special kind of treatment, and one control group without…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…