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…

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…

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…

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…

In this study we examined language learners' attentional processing of a target syntactic construction in written L2 input in different input conditions, the change in learners' knowledge of the targeted construction in these conditions, and the relationship between the change in knowledge and attentional processing. One hundred L2 learners of…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study compared the effectiveness of negative evidence and enriched input on learning the verb-noun collocations. There were 52 English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in this research study and they were randomly assigned to the negative evidence or enriched input groups. While the negative evidence group (n = 27) was provided with…

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…

I propose that the course of development in first and second language acquisition is shaped by two types of processing pressures--internal efficiency-related factors relevant to easing the burden on working memory and external input-related factors such as frequency of occurrence. In an attempt to document the role of internal factors, I consider…

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this…