Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

This study reports developmental changes in morphological encoding across late childhood. We examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the silent production of regularly vs. irregularly inflected verb forms (viz. "-t" vs. "-n" participles of German) in groups of eight- to ten-year-olds, eleven- to…

This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using…

Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's…

This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject-verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish-German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns…

Argues that to improve the parameter model as a theory of language acquisition it has to be constrained in several ways. Results on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement, verb placement, empty subjects, and negation in German child language are presented. (55 references) (JL)

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and…

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was…

Examined the representation of phrase structure in early child German through the investigation of longitudinal data from seven German-speaking toddlers with respect to verb placement, verb inflection, negation, /wh/ pronouns, and complementizers. It is argued that children construct phrase-structure trees in a gradual fashion, on the basis of…

Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

Suggests that differences between first- and second-language learners are due to principles of universal grammar (UG) that guide first language (L1), but not second language (L2) acquisition. This view can be reconciled with the idea that L2 learners can use UG principles to some extent in evaluating target sentences. (49 references) (Author/VWL)

This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five- to seven-year olds, eleven- to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were…