Languages vary as to what kind of phrasal categories allow recursive iteration of self-same embedding. Children first learn an embedding rule, then must learn whether the rule can apply recursively or not. However, direct experience of recursive embedding is rare in the input. A study of… read more
While the L2 perception of segmentals has been investigated, our knowledge of the L2 perception of intonation is limited. Moreover, it is unclear how context affects L1 transfer. This study investigates the perception of English sentence types by adult L1 Spanish speakers across tasks varying in… read more
We investigate the effect of French clitic construction on verb learning. In French, object pronouns precede the verb, and the canonical direct object position remains empty. We test whether children treat such contexts as input for transitivity (since a direct object is morphologically… read more
Across languages, the present perfect introduces a time interval whose right boundary extends to the present time (Todavía no ha llegado/‘She still has not arrived’), but there is variation as to whether perfect forms constitute marked or unmarked forms of past tense reference. We examine the… read more
We analyze all instances of potential or realized Spanish clitic clusters in the María and Emilio corpora from CHILDES from the ages of 1;09 to 3;00. After a brief stage in which they are completely absent, clusters are produced in target contexts at adult rates. Percentage of realization was the… read more
A common assumption in the field of bilingual acquisition is that while bilinguals might have separate language representations, the languages can also influence one another. Previous studies on object (clitic) omission consider a combination of null argument and non-null argument languages, and… read more
Research shows correlations between proficiency and language attitudes. Other studies associate performance in young bilinguals more strongly with adult language input and practice at home than with individual attitudes in youth. No studies, however, have examined how attitudes and family practice… read more
In this study we consider the role of cross-linguistic influence in the domain of wh-movement and subject-verb inversion in children simultaneously acquiring Dutch and French, two typologically different languages. Wh-questions were elicited in Dutch by means of an elicited production task. The… read more
This study examines the syntactic and semantic factors in children’s initial production of determiners. Using longitudinal corpora of two monolingual Spanish-speaking children, we investigate whether children exhibit sensitivity to the pre-/post-verbal asymmetry, and awareness of the… read more
Thirty-three children aged 3–5 were tested for comprehension of definite and bare noun (BN) contrasts in Catalan, a language with bare nouns in direct object but not in subject position. Catalan objects have the same semantics as English subjects: BNs map to generic and definites into specific… read more
We examine the syntactic nature of object omissions in child language with a study comparing French and English-speaking children’s elicited production. We adopt a theoretical approach to transitivity where interactions between modules of the grammar create a rich and flexible system of null… read more
