This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…

Background: It is widely acknowledged that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) predominantly have difficulties in the areas of grammar and vocabulary, with preserved pragmatic skills. Consequently, few studies focus on the pragmatic skills of children with DLD, and there is a distinct lack of studies examining the effectiveness of…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

This study explores typically developing bilingual children's performance in their English as a heritage language. The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of heritage language expectations and the role of chronological age and bilingual exposure. A broad range of receptive and expressive linguistic domains are investigated as a…

The present study aims to test if Turkish L2 users of English judge the grammaticality of generic/habitual real conditionals in Turkish differently compared to Turkish monolinguals. Bassetti and Cook (2011) and Bialystok (2001) claim that one of the outcomes of being a bilingual is an increase in metalinguistic awareness. Accordingly, this study…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[ d ] vs. nod[ ?d ]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English--speaking children.…

This study was set to cross-validate a bilingual Persian-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) against the monolingual English version and compare Iranian EFL learners' performance on the two versions. Various bilingual versions of the VST have been developed based on the assumption that bilingual versions are not affected by the…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

This paper investigates the relationship between multilingualism, code-switching, target language contact and pragmatic and grammatical awareness in learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Participants (N = 144) were university students enrolled in English language courses at a German university. The study employed a cross-sectional…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

The present study aimed at investigating whether L2 learning affects phonological short-term and working memory and first language (L1) development. The performance of a group of 31 4- to-5-year-old sequential bilinguals attending an International School on tasks assessing phonological short-term and working memory and linguistic performance in L1…