We examined French-learning toddlers' sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs. Processing of this infrequent structure in the input (see Corpus Analyses) requires going beyond surface patterns of non-adjacent dependencies to…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

This study is about artificial neural network modeling of the linguistic challenges encountered by students learning Turkish as a foreign language in universities in France. The study was conducted in four universities where Turkish is taught as an optional foreign language. Sixty-six students whose mother tongues were either Arabic or French…

This paper examines the process of acquiring L2s that are closely related to the L1 through data on how adult French speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this L2. We consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the L2 grammar, specifically in the…

In the French verb phrase, negation is often marked twice, by a proclitic element (ne) and by a second negative (such as "pas" or "rien"). Until the seventeenth century, the first element was obligatory, while a second negative was optionally added for emphasis or precision. Subsequently, the second negatives lost their…