When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short…

This article enters the debate about the complex and dynamical nature of second language acquisition (SLA) by discussing and commenting on Pallotti's critique of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Pallotti's critique brings to the fore the argument that, due to its anti-reductionist stance, CDST research fails to observe three fundamental…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical…

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

This article contributes to typological plausibility of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998, 2005) by providing empirical data that show that the stages predicted by PT are followed in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. In the present article, the PT stages for L2 Spanish morphology and syntax are first…

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers' sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in…

Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's…

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…