The present study employed a self-paced reading task in conjunction with concurrent acceptability judgements to examine how similar or diferent English natives and Chinese learners of English are when processing non-local agreement. We also tested how determiner-number specifcation modulates number agreement computation in both native and non-native processing by manipulating number marking with ...

The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese–English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners (the vs. that/these) to see how determiner-specification influences both native and nonnative processing downstream for verbal number ...

This study examined potential sources of grammatical gender variability in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with a focus on morphological markedness. Fifty-four adult Italian HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed an online Self-Paced Reading Task and an offline Grammaticality Judgment Task. Both tasks involved sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical noun-adjective ...

The present article examines the proposal that typology is a major factor guiding transfer selectivity in L3/L<i>n</i> acquisition. We tested first exposure in L3/L<i>n</i> using two artificial languages (ALs) lexically based in English and Spanish, focusing on gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and between nouns and adjectives. 50 L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers took part in the experiment. ...

Spanish captures the difference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and contrast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this difference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. The backgrounds of the target groups ...

We used event-related potentials to investigate how markedness impacts person agreement in English-speaking learners of L2-Spanish. Markedness was examined by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person subjects with third-person verbs and vice-versa. Native speakers showed a P600 for both errors, larger ...

Being able to speak and/or understand multiple languages is a ubiquitous human behavior. Over the past decades in particular, an increasing amount of research has investigated the acquisition, processing, and use of multiple languages as well as how variation therein associates with differential cognitive performance, brain functions and structures (see Bialystok, 2016, Bialystok, 2017, De Houwer, ...

Much of the formal linguistic research on third language (L3) acquisition has focused on transfer source selection, with the overall finding that (global) structural similarity between the L1/L2 and L3 is the strongest predictor of initial transfer patterns. Recently, Cabrelli and Pichan (2021) reported data from the production of underlyingly intervocalic voiced stops in L3 Brazilian Portuguese ...

The goal of this chapter is to lay out the central themes of heritage language acquisition research adopting a formal/theoretical linguistic perspective. Specifically, we aim to provide a detailed discussion of the nature of heritage language grammars. In doing so, we will address the debates on how to explain heritage speaker competence differences from monolingual baselines and more. This ...