We investigate effects of prosodic cues on interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) in English by Spanish-speaking learners. English and Spanish differ in default preference for RC attachment: English has a weak low attachment (LA) preference (RC modifies NP2); Spanish has a stronger high attachment (HA) preference…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Purpose: The first aim of this study was to investigate if Swedish-speaking school-age children with language impairment (LI) show specific morphosyntactic vulnerabilities in error detection. The second aim was to investigate the effects of lexical frequency on error detection, an overlooked aspect of previous error detection studies. Method:…

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will…