Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are heritage speakers of their L1, will also be able to use morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax. To contribute to this line of research, we focused on monolingual (N = 18; Mean Age: 11.43) and bilingual/first generation (N = 108; Mean Age: 11.98), Syrian Arabic-speaking children in Canada, and examined their ability to use gender morphology in their comprehension of relative clauses, while taking into consideration cognitive, environmental, and age-related variables. To this end, we used two offline sentence-picture matching tasks targeting relative clauses and gender (as encoded in SV agreement and object clitics). Results showed that, like monolingual children, first-generation, Arabic-speaking children living in Canada used morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax in their L1. Furthermore, even though there was an association between comprehension of gender agreement and comprehension of relative clauses, performance in gender agreement was higher than performance in relative clauses, suggesting that challenges with complex syntactic structures are not necessarily an epiphenomenon of a morphological deficit.

Studies on the role of speech production on learning have found a memory benefit from production labeled the “Production Effect.” While research with adults has generally shown a robust memory advantage for produced words, children show more mixed results, and the advantage is affected by age, cognitive, and linguistic factors. With adults, the Production Effect is not restricted to the immediate context but is also found after a delay. So far, no studies have investigated the effect of delayed recall on the Production Effect with children. Children aged 5 and 6 years old (n = 60) participated in two sessions. Children were trained on familiar words and images, which were heard (Listen) or produced aloud (Say). Children then performed a free recall task. One week later, children repeated the recall task and an additional recognition task. At immediate testing, there was a recency effect on words recalled from the different training conditions and a recall advantage for words produced over words heard; however, this no longer held after a 1-week delay in either the recall or recognition task. Exploratory analysis showed that vocabulary did not predict the Production Effect. Findings indicate that unlike adults, the Production Effect is not as robust in children after a delay.

Inverse probability adaptation effects (the finding that encountering a verb in an unexpected structure increases long-term priming for that structure) have been observed in both L1 and L2 speakers. However, participants in these studies all had established representations of the syntactic structures to be primed. It therefore remains an open question whether inverse probability adaptation effects could take place with newly encountered L2 structures. In a pre-registered experiment, we exposed participants (n = 84) to an artificial language with active and passive constructions. Training on Day 1 established expectations for specific co-occurrence patterns between verbs and structures. On Day 2, established patterns were violated for the surprisal group (n = 42), but not for the control group (n = 42). We observed no immediate priming effects from exposure to high-surprisal items. On Day 3, however, we observed an effect of input variation on comprehension of verb meaning in an auditory grammaticality judgment task. The surprisal group showed higher accuracy for passive structures in both tasks, suggesting that experiencing variation during learning had promoted the recognition of optionality in the target language.

Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) are right to suggest that working memory is a crucial part of the machinery underlying linguistic development. In this brief commentary, I will move beyond the emergence of phonological representations, on which Pierce et al.’s essay focuses, and consider ways in which working memory shapes the character and acquisition of grammatical phenomena, a topic that has been explored in various ways in the recent literature (e.g., Chater & Christiansen, 2010; Hawkins, 2014; O'Grady, 2005, 2015).

This volume contains all 14 papers and three commentaries from the Recent Advances in the Generative Study of Second Language Acquisition Conference that was held in 1993 at MIT. Eleven of the papers address the acquisition of syntax. Of these, four focus on functional categories in second language (L2) acquisition. Vainikka and Young-Scholten propose that, although lexical categories or content phrases (NP, VP, AP, PP) transfer from the first language to the second, along with the headedness of those categories, functional categories or grammatical phrases (DP, IP, CP) do not. Using longitudinal data from Korean, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish learners of German, they suggest that learners begin by adopting a VP structure for the sentences in the L2 and then subsequently expand this into an underspecified finite phrase (FP), then an agreement phrase (AgrP), and finally a complementizer phrase (CP).

We join other responders in thanking Clahsen and Felser (CF) for pulling together these observations about the development of language processing. We are especially impressed by the generality and inclusiveness of CF's treatment of development in L1 and L2. Because most of their specifics concerned comprehension processes, our contribution will emphasize the added value of an appeal to production processes. In particular, we will articulate the value of applying existing production models to developmental phenomena. Language development can be interpreted in revealing ways through the lens of adult sentence production models. These models specify how lexical, syntactic, morphological, and phonological knowledge are integrated in real time as we produce sentences. They are performance models, but they go well beyond general measures of working memory and general notions of limited capacity and resources.

The acquisition of /s/ plus stop clusters by language-delayed children was compared with normal acquisition, first, for phonemic substitutions and second, for differential use of voice onset time (VOT) for the substituted stops. Ten children, diagnosed as language delayed, produced 95 percent of the intended clusters as singleton stops; children who could employ VOT contrastively produced most stops, substituting for clusters with VOT values in the long lag range.

In two experiments, poor and normal Dutch readers, matched for reading age, were presented with visual matching tasks on a computer screen. In Experiment 1, word and pseudoword letter strings were used. The strings consisted of either uppercase/lowercase congruent (e.g., o/O) or uppercase/lowercase incongruent letters (e.g., a/A). Poor readers needed significantly more time to decode uppercase/lowercase incongruent pairs, especially when the pairs consisted of pseudowords. Experiment 2 investigated whether this effect was phonologically or visually mediated. Strings of letters, digit strings, and abstract figure symbols were used. Letter strings included words, pseudowords, and nonwords. Poor readers needed more time to match incongruent letter case pairs, consistent with Experiment 1. Poor readers performed more poorly on letter and digit string matching but not on the figure–symbol matching task. No evidence was found for the differential use of orthographic information in terms of multiletter constraints. The combined data on the letter, digit, and graphic symbol matching experiments suggest that an inadequate command of grapheme–phoneme associations is a critical factor in reading disability. Evidence for poor visual processing as an independent source of reading disability could not be established.

Child English speakers use nonnominative pronouns in subject position but do not tend to use these types of pronouns with finite verbs. Recent findings demonstrate that knowledge of the pronoun paradigm is relevant to pronoun case errors below the 60% correct finiteness marking level but irrelevant above it. We use a receptive test with children who are above the 60% correct finiteness marking level and show that judgments of nominative case and verb finiteness correlate (r = .549, p < .001, n = 49), consistent with the predictions of case theory. Children at this level of finiteness marking show no asymmetry in feminine versus masculine nonnominative errors, but they do allow third singular –s with nonnominatives, which is problematic for both agreement tense omission model and constructivist priming accounts.

Adolescents often learn science vocabulary through reading. This vocabulary is frequently characterized by multisyllabic words derived from Greek and Latin roots. While most adolescents have acquired the decoding skills to read these multisyllabic words, many students, particularly those with disabilities, cannot engage in independent word learning because they lack the skills to decode these multisyllabic words. Graphomorphemic elements of words, including affixes, support effective decoding and can eventually support word learning. This article describes an approach used to identify the most frequently occurring, stable affixes within science words so that they could be used in “big word” decoding instruction. To illustrate the approach, a subset of high frequency science words and a list of high utility, stable affixes are provided.

The article by Clahsen and Felser (CF) on grammatical processing in language learning is a timely and much-needed synthesis of research on this topic. It correctly identifies both morphological processing and syntactic processing as key areas that require attention. This commentary raises two issues: the relationship between the grammar and the parser, and the need for a transition theory in adult second language (L2) learning.

Our understanding the relationship between verbal short-term memory as indexed by nonword repetition and word learning must now incorporate myriad factors that were not as apparent 17 years ago when Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) proposed that “the phonological memory skills tapped by nonword repetition play a causal role in vocabulary development” (p. 211). In particular, successful nonword repetition involves more than the phonological loop, word learning happens by degrees, and is influenced by many factors other than phonology, and children with specific language impairment (SLI), who have served as test cases by virtue of consistently demonstrating phonological memory deficits, often exhibit other deficits with the potential to negatively impact word learning. Gathercole (2006) still makes the case for temporary phonological storage playing an important role in word learning, but with several caveats. I would like to add two.

Although learning second language phonology is a difficult task, orthographic input may support the learning of difficult sound contrasts through a process known as orthographic facilitation. We extended this research by examining the effects of orthographic input together with individual differences in three different phonological learning processes, namely, the production of, perception of, and memorization of words containing three Marathi phonemic contrasts (i.e., [k-kh], [], and []) by native English speakers. Moreover, because the [] and [] contrasts were particularly challenging in previous auditory training studies (e.g., Polka, 1991), we used cross-modal training in order to enhance learning by pairing auditory perception tasks with visual orthographic information, the amplification of relevant acoustic cues, and proprioceptive descriptions to the articulation of target phonemes. Results showed significant learning from the pre- to the posttest across tasks and contrasts, supporting the effectiveness of cross-modal training. Furthermore, incongruent orthographic input could inhibit perception, and orthographic input generally supported memory for word pronunciations. Moreover, individual differences regarding phonological skills and nonspeech auditory discrimination predicted participants’ success in different phonological learning processes. These results provide a detailed picture of the complexity between different aspects of second language phonological learning and cross-modal training.

Clahsen and Felser (CF) deserve praise for their superlative synthesis of literature relating to grammatical processing, as well as for their original contributions to this area of research. CF “explore the idea that there might be fundamental differences between child L1 and adult L2 processing.” The researchers present evidence that adult second language (L2) processing is often less automatic and less efficient than first language (L1) processing. Qualitative differences are suggested as well. Adult L2 processing may be restricted to shallow computations, whereas L1 processing typically involves detailed representations. These conclusions are reached in large part by comparing highly proficient L2 learners with natives on various neurological and behavioral dimensions of processing. I propose that additional comparisons might be carried out that involve an understudied population: learners whose L2 is their dominant language.

Phonological similarity (i.e., neighborhood density) has been operationalized in the literature as a single phonemic difference between words. However, few studies have assessed the validity of such a measure. In the present study, 50 typical adults were presented with 70 nonwords and asked to name a similar-sounding real word for each item. Results indicated that participants changed an average of one segment per word, although a fifth of productions involved changing more than one of the segments; substitutions were the most common change. Targets that received a wide variety of responses and that did not phonologically resemble many real words resulted in the greatest number of changes. Using a single-segmental metric to index phonological similarity has its limitations, and may inadequately incorporate other influential elements of a word such as the frequencies of its neighbors.

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The present study investigates the interplay between proficiency and empathy in the development of second language (L2) prosody by analyzing the perception and processing of intonation in questions and statements in L2 Spanish. A total of 225 adult L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) from the Northeastern United States completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task in which they listened to four utterance types and categorized them as either questions or statements. We used Bayesian multilevel regression and drift diffusion modeling to analyze the 2AFC data as a function of proficiency level and empathy scores for each utterance type. We show that learner response accuracy and sensitivity to intonation are positively correlated with proficiency, and this association is affected by individual empathy levels in both response accuracy and sentence processing. Higher empathic individuals, in comparison with lower empathic individuals, appear to be more sensitive to intonation cues in the process of forming sound-meaning associations, though increased sensitivity does not necessarily imply increased processing speed. The results motivate the inclusion of measures of pragmatic skill, such as empathy, to better account for intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in second language acquisition.

The aim of the present study was to investigate changes in voicing identification, discrimination, and categorical perception induced by identification training centered on three different training values. One group of French-speaking adults was trained across a universal auditory boundary (−30 ms voice onset time), and two other groups were trained across arbitrary boundaries (−45 or −60 ms voice onset time). A control group did not receive any training. The results showed that both the −30 and the −45 training groups exhibited a 10 ms shift in the identification boundary. Moreover, for the −30 training group, discrimination and categorical perception changed around the French phonological boundary. These results illustrate the possibility of modifying the French phonological perception after short-time training, particularly when centered on a universal boundary. However, training only had limited effects and even strengthened the phonological boundary, congruent with the hypothesis that this boundary is acquired by a perceptual “coupling” between universal boundaries.