Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments.…

The present study compared the performance of two groups of second language learners processing three linguistic structures in Spanish. The linguistic targets were passives, object pronouns in O[subscript pro]VS sentences, and gender-cued null subjects in subordinate clauses. The primary differences between the two groups were language experience…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

Many people imagine dictionaries to be bulky tomes that are hard to lift and are only useful for quick translations or to check the meaning or spelling of difficult words. This paper aims to dispel that myth and show how online versions of monolingual English learners' dictionaries (MELDs) can be used pedagogically to engage students in academic…

This article reports on the development and piloting of a vocabulary recognition test designed for Indigenous Australian children. The research is both application oriented and development oriented. The aims of the article are to determine how well the test is used as a test instrument and the extent to which children recognize vocabulary items in…

This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not…