Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun…

Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and…

Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and case markers following…

Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

This study investigated the role of corrective feedback timing in the acquisition of Spanish noun--adjective gender agreement. Forty-five learners completed a communicative task via synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in one of three groups (immediate, delayed, control). The immediate-feedback group received error reformulations…

This study investigated how standard and substandard varieties of first language (L1) Dutch affect grammatical gender assignments to nouns in second language (L2) German. While German distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, the masculine--feminine distinction has nearly disappeared in Standard Dutch. Many substandard Belgian…

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning…

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…

This study compared negative and positive evidence in adult word learning, predicting that adults would learn more forms following negative evidence. Ninety-two native English speakers (32 men and 60 women [M[subscript age] = 20.38 years, SD = 2.80]), learned nonsense nouns and verbs provided within English frames. Later, participants produced…

Because of less exposure to either language, bilingual children's language acquisition can be delayed relative to monolingual children in domains related to input frequency. This study predicted that the acquisition of gender agreement with adjectives in French would be delayed in bilingual children on a picture description task. The results…

This study employed an artificial language learning paradigm together with a combined behavioral/event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neurocognition of the processing of gender agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology that is problematic in adult second language (L2) learning. Subjects learned to speak and comprehend an…

This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the effects of structural distance on readers' sensitivity to violations of Spanish gender agreement during online sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and English-speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences…

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17-55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities…

This study explored learning and generalization of parts of the Russian case-marking paradigm, an inflecting-fusional system in which affixes simultaneously mark several grammatical features (case, gender, number, animacy). In Experiment 1, adult English speakers (N = 43) were exposed to nouns with transparent gender marking in the nominative case…