The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in…

We describe an exploratory study carried out within the University of Milan, Department of English the aim of which was to analyse features of the spoken English of first-year Modern Languages undergraduates. We compiled a learner corpus, the "Role Play" corpus, which consisted of 69 role-play interactions in English carried out by…

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., "lo" and "la" in "portalo" and "portala" "bring it [masculine]/[feminine]",…

It is known that in American Sign Language (ASL) span is shorter than in English, but this discrepancy has never been systematically investigated using other pairs of signed and spoken languages. This finding is at odds with results showing that short-term memory (STM) for signs has an internal organization similar to STM for words. Moreover, some…

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). "A first language: The early stages", Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult…

This study investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. For the study, we developed a reading test which consists of invented encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. These articles enabled us to test various grammatical structures for their receptive difficulty. This paper discusses…

This paper examines the syntax of "GENDER CONCORD" in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not,…

Includes materials published in the United States and foreign countries by scholars from the U.S. and Canada. (DS)

This experimental study investigates the acquisition of Italian accusative and dative clitics by English adult speakers. These pronouns are non-existent in English. Results from a grammaticality judgement task show that Italian accusative and dative clitics develop slowly but gradually in Italian second language (L2) grammars. Interestingly, the…

This is a small scale, inductive, ethnographic study whose objective is to explore the language learning strategies used by the students of different languages at a language program at the university level. Students of English, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and German participate in the study. Three instruments are used…

Although acquisition criteria are a fundamental issue for SLA research, they have not always been adequately defined or elaborated in the literature. This article critically scrutinizes one such criterion, the emergence criterion, proposing an explicit, operational definition. After discussing emergence as a theoretical construct, the article…

The present study focuses on the representation of verbs in the Italian mental lexicon and investigates some grammatical properties: inflectional class, mood, tense, and person. Two experiments based on free recall of single inflected forms are reported. The patterns of recall and error are taken as evidence for the grammatical and morphological…

Discusses a study of the mood system in Italian, using the systemic functional model as a theoretical framework. In particular, the study focuses on subject ellipsis and explains the two conditions in which the subject must be explicitly expressed in Italian clauses. (CFM)

Briefly discusses the concepts of "subject,""complement,""transitivity," and "intransitivity," contrasts the classes of complements in German and Italian based on identical criteria of classification, justifies such a classification for complements, and suggests didactic implications for the theory of…