Grammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.

The proposal by Clahsen and Felser (CF) has the potential of marking a turning point in second language (L2) acquisition research. Contrary to much L2 research to date, it suggests that some of the differences between native and (advanced) nonnative speakers may be at the level of grammatical processing, rather than grammatical representations. Accounting for L2 speakers' divergent behavior does therefore not necessarily involve positing “representational deficits”: L2 speakers can, and indeed do, attain target representations of the L2, but may compute incomplete (“shallow”) syntactic parses in comprehension. Such shallow processing is often accompanied by reliance (or overreliance) on lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information, which can lead to seemingly trouble-free comprehension in ordinary communication. It is only when speakers are faced with sentence ambiguities, which impose a greater than normal processing load, that the differences between adult L2 language acquirers and child first language (L1) acquirers become apparent: both child and adult language learners have difficulty in integrating structural and nonstructural information in on-line comprehension, but although children prioritize structural information, adult learners privilege nonstructural lexical–semantic information. CF's proposal opens up new perspectives on the nature of ultimate attainment in adult L2 acquisition; at the same time it raises some questions that, in my view, are of crucial importance for future research.

The affiliations for the second, third, and fourth authors were incorrect or incomplete, the corrected title page for which is provided herein. We regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.

Three groups of subjects who used English as a second language and who were considered to be at different levels of proficiency in English participated in a study of transfer of learning from English to Yoruba, their native language, and from Yoruba to English. It was predicted that total transfer from one language to the other would decrease with increasing proficiency in English and that transfer from Yoruba to English would be higher than from English to Yoruba at lower levels of proficiency in English. Findings showed rather that total transfer increased with increasing proficiency in English and that transfer from English to Yoruba was higher than from Yoruba to English for all groups. It is concluded that on a verbal transfer task, bilinguals show development from independent to interdependent language systems with increasing proficiency in a second language.

This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.

Evidentiality refers to the linguistic marking of the nature/directness of source of evidence of an asserted event. Some languages (e.g., Turkish) mark source obligatorily in their grammar, while other languages (e.g., English) provide only lexical options for conveying source. The present study examined whether or under what conditions firsthand source information is relied on more than nonfirsthand sources in establishing discourse coherence. Turkish- and English-speaking participants read a series of somewhat incongruous two-sentence narratives and were to come up with a way of completing each narrative so that it would form a coherent story. Each narrative contrasted two source types (firsthand vs. hearsay, firsthand vs. inference, or inference vs. hearsay) and two information types (general vs. particular information) each presented first or second. Analysis of story completions showed greater overall reliance on firsthand information when it was presented second and referred to a particular event. When the firsthand source occurred first and the particular event occurred second, the latter was favored, especially by Turkish participants. Taken together, the findings suggest that evidentiality interacts with information type in establishing discourse coherence and that both firsthand and particular information are relied on more when presented later rather than earlier in discourse.

In the early 1990s, Lynn Cherny spent much of her time in the MUD – not mired in wet earth, but actively exploring “Multi-User Dungeons.” These “fictional universes with a focus on role-playing,” as they are defined in the Introduction, enable groups of Internet-connected individuals to assemble in cyberspace, communicating by way of sequentially typed text. Later, as a doctoral student in linguistics at Stanford, Cherny decided to study ethnographically – that is, from the perspective of one methodically and dispassionately observing a different race – the expressive practices of those habitually using this strange new modality.

Infants are exposed to the language of the environment in which they are born and, in most instances, become native speakers of that language. Although the history of research on language acquisition provides a colorful debate on the specific ways that nature and nurture shape this process (e.g., MacWhinney, 1999; Pinker, 1995), its primary focus has been on typically developing children exposed to a single language from birth. Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) turn the table on this discussion to argue that critically important lessons can be learned by shifting the focus from typically developing children to children for whom the trajectory of language learning follows a different course. Some of the variation in language development reflects attributes of child learners themselves, such as whether they are born hearing or deaf and whether they have conditions that disrupt their ability to fully perceive the speech input to which they are exposed. Other variations reflect attributes of the external conditions in which learners develop, including whether they remain in their country of birth or move to a location in which another language is spoken, whether exposure to the native language is continuous or disrupted, and whether they are exposed to a second language (L2) early or late in development. For deaf children, there is also variation in whether their parents or caregivers are themselves deaf or hearing and able to expose them to sign language during infancy. Pierce et al. use the diversity of early language experience as a tool to examine the relation between phonological working memory and language development and to begin to suggest how conditions that may produce costs or benefits in language learning may be related to one another.

Normally hearing children (aged 4–10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6–14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed significantly better than hearing-impaired children. However, orally educated children with mild or moderate hearing losses did not perform better than children with severe or profound losses. Instead, hearingimpaired children exhibited marked metalinguistic deficits, regardless of their degree of hearing loss. Finally, bimodally educated children performed significantly worse than orally educated children on the metalinguistic tasks of the present study. The implications of these findings for educational instruction are discussed.

The tendency to translate from a weaker to a stronger language was investigated as a function of proficiency in the nondominant language. Three groups of native Hebrew speakers with varying degrees of proficiency in English read passages of alternating English and Hebrew sentences. Subjects identified a following recognition sentence as either “identical” to a sentence read in the passage, a “translation” of a sentence read in the passage, or “new,” and then rated their confidence. The results showed no evidence for translation processes; with respect to “identical” and “translation” pairs, none of the groups was more accurate in recognizing sentences originally presented in their dominant language. These findings, which parallel those of an earlier study in which nonfluent bilinguals were tested auditorally, reflect similar psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying nondominant language processing in speakers of different levels of proficiency. The results were related to the distinction between automatic and controlled processes involved in dominant versus nondominant language processing.

In two reading experiments involving a self-paced reading task, we explored how literariness affects initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading in second language German. In Experiment 1, literariness was operationalized along the formalist, language-driven approach, focusing on the role of literary devices and their assumed ability to draw readers’ attention to the verbal message itself. In Experiment 2, we included conventions related to reading fiction (book title, author name, and year of publishing) to modulate the reader’s mode of text processing, which defines literariness according to reader-driven approaches (e.g., reception theory). Contrary to the expectations based on the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt, 2012), we did not observe any advantage for incidental vocabulary acquisition in literary texts compared to nonliterary ones. However, in accordance with claims taking into account the limits of cognitive resources, we found evidence that acquisition of unknown words is impeded, if these directly participate in a literary device.

In the article by Spätgens and Schoonen, the penultimate paragraph on page 237 incorrectly states that the coding for the Animacy variable is “(0 inanimate, 1 animate).” The correct coding should instead read “(0 animate, 1 inanimate).” We regret this omission and any problems it may have caused.