This research examines whether an individual's linguistic knowledge, either as a speaker of a particular language or as a bilingual, influences theory of mind development. Three- and four-year-old English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese monolinguals, and Mandarin-English bilinguals were given appearance-reality, level 2 perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. All children were tested twice, a week apart; the bilinguals were tested in each of their languages. The 4-year-olds in each group performed significantly better than the corresponding 3-year-olds. Both monolingual groups performed similarly on the tasks, and the bilinguals performed significantly better than the monolingual groups, although when the two testing times were examined separately, they had only a near-significant tendency to perform better at the second testing time. Possible explanations for this evidence of a bilingual advantage are greater inhibitory control, greater metalinguistic understanding, and a greater sensitivity to sociolinguistic interactions with interlocutors.

Cross-linguistic transfer can be explained by structural ambiguity in a bilingual child's two languages (Döpke, 1998; Hulk and Müller, 2000). This study examined the effect of morphological ambiguity in transfer of deverbal compounds in English and French. English-speaking children go through a stage of producing ungrammatical verb-object compounds in their acquisition of object-verb-er compounds. In French, verb-object compounds are productive. If structural ambiguity predicts when transfer occurs, French-English bilingual children should use more ungrammatical verb-object compounds than English-speaking children and more grammatical verb-object compounds than French-speaking children. This study focused on 36 French-English bilingual children's production and comprehension of novel deverbal compounds in both languages. The results supported these predictions for production but not for comprehension. It is concluded that cross-linguistic transfer is a language production phenomenon and that structural ambiguity can predict when morphological transfer can occur.

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I wish to discuss two sets of problematic cases that arose when I applied Myers-Scotton's (1993) Matrix Language Frame model of codeswitching to Arabic diglossic switching (Boussofara-Omar, 1999). The first set involves the co-occurrence of system morphemes from both varieties of Arabic within a single CP. The second set concerns CPs in which the word order is that of the dialect but the system morphemes are from Standard Arabic, and CPs in which clashes occur between the subcategorization restrictions of the two varieties of Arabic participating in diglossic switching. The Matrix Language Frame model neither predicts nor offers explanations for either case. Second, in an effort to provide an explanation to their occurrence, I revisit the same problematic sets in light of Myers-Scotton's sub-models: the 4-M model and the Abstract Level model (Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2000, 2001), the latest refined version of the MLF model.

Languages vary idiosyncratically in the sets of referents to which common nouns are applied. To use nouns as a native speaker would, second language learners must acquire language-specific naming patterns, not merely a language-to-language correspondence. We asked second language learners to name household objects in English and in their native language, to judge the objects' typicality with respect to English names, and to provide naming strategy reports. The least experienced learners' naming and typicality judgments diverged substantially from native responses. More experienced learners improved, but even those with the most extensive experience retained some discrepancies from native patterns. Time spent immersed in an English-speaking environment was a better predictor of performance than years of formal instruction. Discrepancies do not appear to be due to direct mapping from the learner's own language. We discuss how incomplete lexical knowledge may affect second language performance and the implications for models of second language lexical development.

The proposal has been made (Zuckerman, 1999, 2001, with various antecedents) that economy of derivation is operative in language acquisition in such a way that whenever movement appears to be optional to the child, s/he chooses the derivation without movement. In this paper we undertake the task of finding evidence for this claim in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. We draw on data available in the literature and on original data from a bilingual English-Dutch child. This child's word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target (e.g. there are no V2 embedded clauses in his Dutch productions), and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising (in particular, lack of verb raising in embedded sentences in English). These patterns are predicted if economy of derivation holds; further, bilingual children, having as input languages with possibly diverging parameter settings, are especially prone to an extended parameter setting period, giving rise to deviant word order patterns, and thus offering insight into the mechanisms of language acquisition.