The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

Background: The body of literature on narratives of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) is growing. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of bilingual preschool children with SLI and their patterns of growth. Aims: To determine the similarities and differences in narrative abilities between…

The data on language acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) primarily come from studies in English reporting particular morphemes that differentiate them from their typically developing (TYP) peers, but markers of impairment vary cross-linguistically. There is some cross-linguistic evidence that SLI disrupts language…

Many studies on bilingual language processing have shown that lexical access is not selective with respect to language. These studies typically used nouns as word stimuli. The aim of the present study was to extend the previous findings on noun processing to verb processing. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performed a lexical…

This article examines problems in translation on the level of semantics, phonology, syntax, and morphology. The use of the subjunctive is discusses as a specific problem area. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Investigated the acquisition of verb placement by bilingual young children learning both German and English. Researchers recorded their speech monthly for three years and analyzed word order in the verb phrase. The children were actively involved in the process of determining structure in each language. Development of language output did not…

Investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the role in French sentences. (46…

Investigates the acquisition of verb movement phenomena in the interlanguage of English native speakers learning French as a second language. Participants were given a grammaticality judgment task and production task. French native speakers' results go against certain theoretical predictions of negation and adverb placement in nonfinite contexts,…

This report discusses a study of a Norwegian six-year-old child's acquisition of English syntax in a second language environment. Interrogative and negative sentences which require periphrasis with "do" are the forms considered in the analysis. Although the formal aim of the study is limited to an effort at discovering more about developmental…

Several recent reports on the untutored second language acquisition of English have suggested that the same developmental sequence holds for the acquisition of the interrogative structures irrespective of whether English is acquired as a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). These studies have been conducted within the Klima & Bellugi…

Developmental data from the acquisition of English by a German child, aged 5, are analyzed with a view to identifying structural conditions that give rise to interference, and to determine which L2 structures are affected and which structures govern developmental changes. Word order in German and English sentences ahve reflexes in different…

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

This collection of papers presents research on language processing among second language learners and bilinguals. The nine papers include the following: (1) "The Bilingual's Language Modes" (Francois Grosjean); (2) "The Voicing Contrast in English and Spanish: The Relationship between Perception and Production" (Mary L. Zampini…

A study examined the acquisition of negation in English as a Second Language in a 4-year-old Salvadoran girl, a native speaker of Spanish. Specifically, the study looked for evidence of language transfer in bilingual acquisition and the direction of that transfer (Spanish to English, English to Spanish). Over 5 months, spontaneous speech (55…