Purpose: This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children's second language (L2) and whether L2 children's past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee's (2007) usage-based network model. Method: A group of L2…

The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French-English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English…

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10-1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results…

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age = 4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic…

This study was designed to investigate the development of third-person singular (3SG) -"s" in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage-based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2-year period.…

Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to determine whether a combination of English-language measures and a parent questionnaire on first-language development could adequately discriminate between English-language learners (ELLs) with and without language impairment (LI) when children had diverse first-language backgrounds. Method:…

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2), and specific language impairment (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI…

Examines the use of tense, agreement, and non-tense morphemes and associated distributional contingencies in the language production of Quebec French-Speaking children with specific language impairment and normally developing language and age-matched controls. Sought to determine whether the optimal infinitive/extended optional infinitive pattern…

Purpose: This study was conducted to examine whether the expressive language characteristics of typically developing (TD) children learning English as a second language (ESL) have similarities to the characteristics of the English that is spoken by monolingual children with specific language impairment (SLI), and whether this could result in the…