This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Quechua is the largest indigenous language family to constitute the first language (L1) of second language (L2) Spanish speakers. Despite sheer number of speakers and typologically interesting contrasts, Quechua-Spanish second language acquisition is a nearly untapped research area,…

This study compares the development of three different types of bilingual/second language children in their acquisition of gender-marking on adjectives in Dutch to investigate whether there is evidence for age-of-onset effects in early childhood as proposed by Meisel (2009). The three groups of children are: simultaneous bilingual children,…

In this study we investigate the linguistic performance of a school age French-Greek simultaneous bilingual boy with specific language impairment (SLI) on the production of subject-verb agreement, object clitic pronouns and wh-questions. In addition, we compare his performance on these linguistic structures with that of two French-Greek bilingual…

This experimental study investigates event construal by early Dutch-German bilinguals, as reflected in their oral depiction of everyday events shown in video clips. The starting point is the finding that the expression of an aspectual perspective (progressive aspect), and its consequences for event construal, is dependent on the extent to which…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nuse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1…

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to…

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd-6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and…

In this paper I claim that there is evidence of grammatical interference in the development of ergative case in bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish. While both monolingual and bilingual children have difficulty acquiring the ergative case in Basque (Barrena, 1995; Ezeizabarrena, 1996), my results indicate that bilingual children omit…

Purpose: To evaluate the discriminant accuracy of a grammatical measure for the identification of language impairment (LI) in Latino English-speaking children. Specifically, the study examined the diagnostic accuracy of the Test of English Morphosyntax (E-MST; Pena, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore (n.d.) to determine (a)…

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can vary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic…

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times…