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摘要：Previous studies have found that the early fitting of cochlear implants in children has beneficial effects on their expressive and receptive language. However, different ages are identified in different studies, and some studies present contradictory results. Starting from these observations, our study suggests that at least two additional factors play an important role in determining linguistic outcomes. The first is the area of language under investigation: lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The second factor is the typological features of the child's target language. Our study, which involved 33 Italian-speaking children who received a cochlear implant and 33 age and gender matched controls, reveals that lexical, semantic, pragmatic, and phonological knowledge are not particularly vulnerable in these children. By contrast, one area of morphosyntax (production of clitic pronouns) is especially challenging. In addition, an effect of age of implantation was found only in this morphosyntactic area. This is the first study on language development in Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The assignment of grammatical functions has been a key feature of hierarchical (serial) models of speech production since their inception in the 1970s. This article argues that grammatical function assignment is neither sufficient nor necessary in such models. It reports a study of the effects of the conceptual accessibility of referents on the selection of English dative syntactic frames in production and shows that the effects relate to linear precedence rather than grammatical function assignment. A secondary topic addressed in the same study is whether second language speakers of English have difficulty integrating syntactic knowledge where it interfaces with conceptual accessibility in speech production. Findings suggest that advanced proficiency speakers do not and are qualitatively similar to native speakers. The implications of this for the interface hypothesis about second language acquisition are discussed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Two experiments successfully trained novices to categorize French nouns by grammatical gender, resulting in high levels of performance after delay. Training with a frequent exemplar and training with a more diverse exemplar set led to equivalent learning. However, providing explicit rules with correctness feedback led to better generalization and retention than did correctness feedback alone or feature focusing without explicit rule information. This suggests that, at least for some grammar tasks, explicit information about form-function mappings improves learning. Moreover, the advantage of rule instruction was robust to testing and training under time pressure. Thus, rule instruction may be helpful even when speeded performance is required, supporting the prediction that practice leads to proceduralization of declarative grammatical knowledge. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of 'early' and 'late' phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Two separate studies examined older siblings' influence on the language exposure and language development of US-born toddlers who were being raised in bilingual homes. The participants in Study 1 were 60 children between 16 and 30 months who had heard English and another language at home from birth; 26 had older siblings, and 34 did not. The participants in Study 2 were 27 children, assessed at 22 and 30 months, who had heard English and Spanish from birth; 14 had school-aged older siblings, and 13 did not. Both studies found that older siblings used English more in talking to the toddlers than did other household members and that toddlers with older siblings were more advanced in English language development. Study 2 also found that the presence of a school-aged older sibling increased mothers' use of English with their toddlers and that toddlers without a school-aged older sibling were more advanced in Spanish than the toddlers with a school-aged older sibling. These findings contribute to a picture of the complex processes that shape language use in bilingual homes and cause variability in young children's bilingual development. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison and resyllabification can render word and syllable boundaries ambiguous (e.g., un air 'an air'/un nerf 'a nerve,' both [.nE]). Production data have demonstrated that speakers of French vary the duration of consonants that surface in liaison environments relative to consonants produced word initially. Further research has suggested that listeners exploit these durational differences in the processing of running speech, although no study to date has directly tested this hypothesis. The current study examines the exploitation of duration in word recognition processes by manipulating this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors in the signal constant. The pivotal consonants in potentially ambiguous French sequences (e.g., /n/ in un nerf) were instrumentally shortened and lengthened and presented to listeners in two behavioral tasks. The results suggest that listeners are sensitive to segmental duration and use this information to modulate the lexical interpretation of spoken French. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined whether late-learning English-German second language (L2) learners and late-learning German-English L2 learners use prosodic cues to disambiguate temporarily ambiguous first language and L2 sentences during speech production. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that English-German L2 learners and German-English L2 learners used a pitch rise and pitch accent to disambiguate PP-attachment sentences in German. However, the same participants, as well as monolingual English speakers, only used pitch accent to disambiguate similar English sentences. Taken together, these results indicate the L2 learners used prosody to disambiguate sentences in both of their languages and did not fully transfer cues to disambiguation from their first language to their L2. The results have implications for the acquisition of L2 prosody and the interaction between prosody and meaning in L2 production. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined the comprehension of actional and psychological verbs in both their active and passive (short and long) forms by 99 Serbian-speaking children. The children, whose age ranged between 3 years, 6 months (3;6) and 7 years, 6 months (7;6), were divided into three groups: 3;6-5 (M = 4.3), 5;1-6;1 (M = 5.6), and 6;2-7;6 (M = 7.0). All groups reached ceiling performance on actives of both actional and psychological verbs. They showed a good performance on passives of actional verbs, both short and long, but an exceptionally low performance on passives of psychological verbs: only the oldest group, 7-year-olds, reached 80% correct performance on psychological passives. There were no differences in the children's performance on short versus long passives of either type of the verb. These results are in line with studies reporting delayed passive comprehension in children younger than 5 in a number of languages, suggesting a delay in the comprehension of this structure cross-linguistically. The discrepancy observed in the comprehension of psychological passives, as opposed to actional actives, fits neatly into Borer and Wexler's account, which relates children's difficulties in this area to their underlying knowledge of argument chains created by movement of sentential elements. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper explores whether English-Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children. Six English-speaking and six Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, and nine English-Mandarin bilingual children (who were more dominant in English) were videotaped while interacting with their caregivers. Monolingual Mandarin- and English-speaking children produced null arguments and pronouns respectively to indicate given third-person referents, and nouns to indicate new third-person referents. They also gestured new third-person referents more often than given third-person referents. Thus, monolinguals' speech and gestures followed the discourse principle. English-Mandarin bilingual children's speech and gestures also followed the discourse principle but only when they were speaking in English. They produced nouns more often to indicate given third-person referents than to indicate new third-person referents in Mandarin, indicating the violation of the discourse principle. It is interesting that they gestured new third-person referents more often than given third-person referents in Mandarin. Thus, our findings suggest that gesture precedes language development at discourse level in the less-dominant language in bilinguals. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an online task that compared processing and comprehension of active and passive sentences containing verbs strongly associated with the passive and active constructions, as determined by collostructional analysis. As predicted by usage-based accounts, participants' performance was influenced by frequency (both groups processed actives faster than passives; the low academic attainment participants also made significantly more errors on passive sentences) and lexical specificity (i.e., processing of passives was slower with verbs strongly associated with the active). Contra to proposals made by Dbrowska and Street (2006), the results suggest that all participants have verb-specific as well as verb-general representations, but that the latter are not as entrenched in the participants with low academic attainment, resulting in less reliable performance. The results also show no evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off, making alternative accounts of the results (e.g., those of two-stage processing models, such as Townsend & Bever, 2001) problematic. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier English exposure led to larger English vocabulary in kindergarten. There was no interference of early English exposure on native-language vocabulary. Moreover, Cantonese-speaking children had higher English expressive vocabulary scores than Spanish-speaking children and this difference remained for the 3 years. In contrast, although there were no significant differences in first language vocabulary at the start of kindergarten, Spanish-speaking children had steeper growth rates in first-language vocabulary than Cantonese-speaking children, after controlling for language of instruction and first-language concepts about print. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Bilinguals often face the challenge of negotiating a range of insider/outsider subject positions when interacting in transnational and intercultural settings. This article takes up the concept of symbolic competence, the awareness of socially situated symbolic resources and the ability to use them to shape interactional contexts, to examine how the author, a Swedish-English bilingual, manages this negotiation. Drawing on principles of the ethnography of communication in concert with the complementary discourse analytic perspective of nexus analysis, ethnographic vignettes are analyzed to explore strategic language choices the author made during specific speech situations in Sweden. It is shown that the concealment of linguistic abilities, or covert bilingualism, served as a resource to support the symbolic competence needed to facilitate the presentation of self during social encounters while mitigating the ambiguity of being simultaneously insider and outsider. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This Forum challenges the generally accepted position in the linguistic sciences -- conscious or not -- that monolingualism and nativeness are essentially synonymous in an exclusive way. We discuss two consequences of our position that naturalistic bilinguals and multilinguals exposed to a language in early childhood are also native speakers: (i) that bi-/multilinguals have multiple native languages; and (ii) nativeness can be applicable to a state of linguistic knowledge that is characterized by significant differences to the monolingual baseline. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a "reduced form" competitor, a "canonical form" competitor, and an unrelated distractor. Target sentences were presented in isolation or with a wider discourse context. Experiment 1 revealed that target recognition was facilitated by wider discourse information. It is important that the recognition of reduced forms improved significantly when preceded by strongly rather than by weakly supportive discourse contexts. This was not the case for canonical forms: listeners' target word recognition was not dependent on the degree of supportive context. Experiment 2 showed that the differential context effects in Experiment 1 were not due to an additional amount of speaker information. Thus, these data suggest that in natural settings a strongly supportive discourse context is more important for the recognition of reduced forms than the recognition of canonical forms.

摘要：We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although there were no significant differences between the groups with respect to socioemotional and cognitive development, the adoptees scored significantly lower than the controls on measures of receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definitions, and sentence recall, findings that were similar to those reported by Gauthier and Genesee. Analyses of correlations between the adopted children's language test results and their age at adoption, length of exposure to the adoption language, health, and other developmental problems revealed relatively few significant associations. In contrast, analyses of the relationship between their language test scores and their performance on the recalling sentences subtest suggest a link between performance on these two tests. We speculate on the role that performance on sentence recall might play in mediating differences in language outcomes between the two groups of children.

摘要：This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., the tigers) and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., tigers) in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic readings in English are expressed with bare plurals, which are ungrammatical in Spanish in preverbal subject position. Two studies were conducted in order to investigate the role of first language transfer in this domain in both English --> Spanish and Spanish --> English directions. Study 1 used a meaning-focused task to probe learners' interpretation of definite plural noun phrases, whereas Study 2 used a form-focused task to examine learners' judgments of the acceptability of definite and bare plurals in generic versus specific contexts. First language transfer was attested in both directions, at lower proficiency levels, whereas more targetlike performance was attested at higher proficiency levels. Furthermore, learners were found to be more successful in learning about the (un)grammaticality of bare plurals in the target language than in assigning the target interpretation to definite versus bare plurals. This finding is shown to be consistent with other studies' findings of plural noun phrase interpretation in monolingual and bilingual children.

摘要：The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of pause frequency, duration, variation in durations, and pause location indicated that pause time decreased with retelling, but not with age group except when child and adult pausing was considered in its speech and language context. The results suggest that differences in child and adult pausing reflect differences in child and adult language, not in the cognitive resources allocated to language production. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

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