Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems…

Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to…

We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the…

It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch…

This study investigated how well second language (L2) readers of English use context to identify proper names as such. It represents a first step in exploring a widely held assumption that L2 readers of English can easily identify proper names by their form and function. The study isolates the issue of function to investigate whether context alone…

The present study applies a multidimensional methodological approach to the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax. It focuses on evaluating the degree of productivity of an infrequent subject-verb agreement pattern in the early acquisition of French and considers the explanatory role played by factors such as input frequency, semantic…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared…

Grammatical gender embedded in determiners, nouns and adjectives allows indirect and more rapid processing of the referents implied in sentences. However in a language such as Spanish, this useful information cannot be reliably retrieved from a single source of information. Instead, noun gender may be extracted either from phono-morphological,…

Cognates have served as a useful tool for investigating the bilingual lexicon in many studies, but very little research has been carried out on different types of cognates, specifically, partial cognates and their role in cross-linguistic effect. The present study examines cognate effect in the speech production and acceptability judgment of two…

Among the many ways in which sounds alternate in the world's languages, changes in the order of sounds (metathesis) are relatively rare. Mutsun, a Southern Costanoan language of California which was documented extensively before the death of its last speaker in 1930, displays three patterns of synchronic consonant-vowel (CV) metathesis. Two of…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards…

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children…