The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition)…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -"ed" as an…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

This paper explores whether there is evidence for age and/or input effects in child L2 acquisition across three different linguistic domains, namely morphosyntax, vocabulary, and syntax-semantics. More specifically, it compares data from English-speaking children whose age of onset to L2 Dutch was between one and three years with data from…

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a…

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors: regular…

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)