Incidental Learning of Gender Agreement in L2

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to the learners). Both receptive and productive knowledge and the mediating role of working memory (WM) in learning were measured. Speakers of the ungendered language were able to successfully acquire receptive but not productive grammatical knowledge in a new language under incidental exposure. WM was engaged in production but not in a grammaticality judgment task in the incidental learning condition, indicating cognitive effort during knowledge retrieval

Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: the effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children

One hundred and seventy-two English-speaking 5- to 7-year-olds participated in a referential communication task where we manipulated the linguistic mention and the visual presence of a competitor alongside a target referent. Eighty-seven of the children were additionally exposed to a language other than English (bilinguals). We measured children’s language proficiency, verbal working memory (WM), cognitive control skills, family SES, and relative amount of cumulative exposure and use of the home language for the bilinguals. Children’s use of full Noun Phrases (NPs) to identify a target referent was predicted by the visual presence of a competitor more than by its linguistic mention. Verbal WM and proficiency predicted NP use, while cognitive control skills predicted both the ability to use expressions signalling discourse integration and sensitivity to the presence of a discourse competitor, but not of a visual competitor. Bilingual children were as informative as monolingual children once proficiency was controlled for

Encouraging use of subordination in children’s narratives: a classroom-based priming study

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children’s use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking five- year-olds heard 10 stories, one a day, that either contained a high proportion of subordinate clauses (subordination condition) or a high proportion of coordi- nate clauses (coordination condition). Post-intervention, there was a significant group difference in likelihood of subordinate use which persisted ten weeks after the priming. Neither expressive grammatical nor receptive vocabulary skills were positively correlated with the likelihood of subordinate use. These findings show that input manipulation can have a facilitative effect on the use of complex syntax over several weeks in a realistic communicative task

Heritage portuguese and heritage polish in contact with german: more evidence on the production of objects

This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.The research was partially funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Reference: UID/ELT/00305/2019) and by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland, 2014/15/G/HS6/04521

The effect of linguistic nativeness in structural priming in comprehension

The role of linguistic experience in structural priming is unclear. Although it is explicitly predicted that experience contributes to priming effects on at least one theoretical account (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006), to date the empirical data has been mixed. To investigate this issue we conducted four sentence-picture matching experiments that primed for the comprehension of object relative clauses in L1 and proficient L2 speakers of German. It was predicted that an effect of experience would only be observed in instances where priming effects are likely to be weak in experienced L1 speakers. In such circumstances priming should still be strong in L2 speakers because of their comparative lack of experience using and processing the L2 test structures. The experiments therefore systematically manipulated the primes to decrease lexical and conceptual overlap between primes and targets. The results supported the hypothesis: in two of the four studies the L2 group showed different priming effects when compared to the L1 group. This effect only occurred when animacy differences were introduced between the prime and target. The results suggest that linguistic experience as operationalised by nativeness affects the strength of priming, specifically in cases where there is a lack of lexical and conceptual overlap between prime and target

Word order, referential expression, and case cues to the acquisition of transitive sentences in Italian

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) andselected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames usedwith overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated howItalian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended theseorders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject–verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children chosebetween two videos (e.g., horse acting on cat versus cat acting onhorse), both involving the same action. The children aged 2;6comprehended S+object-pronoun+V (SOPROV) significantly betterthan S+V+object-noun (SVONOUN). We explain this in terms of cue collaboration between a low cost cue (CASE) and the FIRST ARGUMENT=AGENT cue which we found to be reliable 76% of the time. The mostdifficult word order for all age groups was the object-pronoun+V+S(OPROVS). We ascribe this difficulty to cue conflict between the twomost frequent transitive frames found in CDS, namely V+objectnounand object-pronoun+V

Introduction: an overview of the acquisition of reference

Language is a social tool that allows us to speak to others about the world. In doing so we need words that pick out those entities that we want to talk about. Linguistic expressions that identify such entities are known as referential or referring expressions, including proper names (Laura), natural kind terms (water, gold, tiger), indexicals (you, I, she), and definite descriptions (the dog, the smallest positive number). The mechanisms of reference have been the subject of intense speculation, and the debate over descriptive (Frege 1892/1948; Searle, 1958) vs. causal (Kripke, 1972/1980) or hybrid theories of reference (Evans, 1973) is still rife in the semantics literature (Genone & Lombrozo, 2012; Lam, 2010; Martí, 2014). Whatever the theoretical approach to reference, from a developmental perspective the three key questions are the following: What is the trajectory of language learners’ comprehension and production of referential expressions? To what extent, and in which contexts, do children abide by the same linguistic constraints as adults in their referential choices? How do cross-linguistic differences shape the process of referential choice acquisition