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Variability in children's language acquisition is likely due to a number of cognitive and social variables. The current study investigated whether individual differences in statistical learning (SL), which has been implicated in language acquisition, independently predicted 6- to 8-year-old's comprehension of syntax. Sixty-eight (N = 68) English-speaking children completed a test of comprehension of four syntactic structures, a test of SL utilizing nonlinguistic visual stimuli, and several additional control measures. The results revealed that SL independently predicted comprehension of two syntactic structures that show considerable variability in this age range: passives and object relative clauses. These data suggest that individual differences in children's capacity for SL are associated with the acquisition of the syntax of natural languages.

Measures of syntactic complexity such as mean length of T-unit have been common measures of language proficiency in studies of second language acquisition. Despite the ubiquity and usefulness of such structure-based measures, they could be complemented with measures based on usage-based theories, which focus on the development of not just syntactic forms but also form-meaning pairs, called constructions (Ellis, 2002). Recent cross-sectional research (Kyle & Crossley, 2017) has indicated that indices related to usage-based characteristics of verb argument construction (VAC) use may be better indicators of writing proficiency than structure-based indices of syntactic complexity. However, because cross-sectional studies can only show general trends across proficiency benchmarks, it is important to test these findings in individuals over time (Lowie & Verspoor, 2019). Thus, this study investigates the developmental trajectories of second language learners of English across two academic years with regard to syntactic complexity and VAC sophistication.

This study examined how students of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different first language (L1) backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing. Specifically, to explore unique patterns of metadiscourse features that reflect context and development, the essays written by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean EFL students at three proficiency levels were analyzed for topic, L1 background, and L2 proficiency. For a comprehensive analysis of 1986 essays, I used a natural language processing tool that generates quantity scores for Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse categories (i.e., hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, reader pronouns, and directives). The results showed notable differences in the students’ use of metadiscourse features across topics, and significant variation was also found across different L1 groups. However, their use of interactional metadiscourse did not differ by L2 proficiency. A post hoc analysis of a parallel native-speaker corpus further revealed EFL students’ underuse of hedges and overuse of reader pronouns. Findings are discussed in terms of academic writing instruction, writing prompt development, and L2 learner categorization.

This study investigated the effects of word frequency, collocational frequency, L1 congruency, and L2 proficiency, on L2 collocational processing. Two groups of L1 Japanese speakers of English (intermediate and advanced) and one group of English native speakers (NSs) performed an online acceptability judgment task on four types of adjective-noun constructions: (1) congruent collocations, (2) English-only collocations, (3) Japanese-only collocations, and (4) baseline items. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling and correlations. In contrast to NSs, nonnative speakers (NNSs) processed congruent collocations significantly faster than English-only collocations. As for frequency, all three groups demonstrated sensitivity to both word-level and collocation-level frequency. However, the distributions differed across the three groups. We concluded that age/order of acquisition effects (Carroll & White, 1973) provided the best explanation for the congruency results. Regarding the frequency results, we concluded that the findings conflict with claims that NNSs may process formulaic sequences differently than NSs (e.g., Wray, 2002, 2008).

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., that, there) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.

In response to shifting sociocultural constructions of gender and the emerging visibility of non‐binary subject positions, grammatically binary linguistic systems, such as French, are being challenged, subverted, and adapted. This paper describes and analyzes formal, structural, and ideological aspects of how contemporary French speakers are confronting and innovating beyond the gender binary, highlighting the lack of scholarly attention and increase in public salience afforded to these issues. Survey data from 174 adult speakers of French are used to outline the forms used by non‐binary Francophones, the degree of form variance, and the self‐reported comprehensibility ratings of these forms. The findings establish consistent trends in the non‐binary language forms used and their comprehensibility, while highlighting the importance of variance for individual agency in non‐binary Francophone communities. These findings are foundational to a consideration of the of teaching non‐binary forms in foreign language classrooms and curricula for inclusivity and competence development. The Challenge L2 educators strive to create inclusive classrooms for students of all genders. However, a lack of resources on gender non‐binary language forms limits the ability to fully realize inclusion. How can all L2 identities be made sayable? How can teaching to and about non‐binary speakers support inclusivity and competence development?

The present article addresses the following question: what variables condition syntactic transfer? Evidence is provided in support of the position that third language (L3) transfer is selective, whereby, at least under certain conditions, it is driven by the typological proximity of the target L3 measured against the other previously acquired linguistic systems (cf. Rothman and Cabrelli Amaro, 2007, 2010; Rothman, 2010; Montrul et al., 2011). To show this, we compare data in the domain of adjectival interpretation between successful first language (L1) Italian learners of English as a second language (L2) at the low to intermediate proficiency level of L3 Spanish, and successful L1 English learners of L2 Spanish at the same levels for L3 Brazilian Portuguese. The data show that, irrespective of the L1 or the L2, these L3 learners demonstrate target knowledge of subtle adjectival semantic nuances obtained via noun-raising, which English lacks and the other languages share. We maintain that such knowledge is transferred to the L3 from Italian (L1) and Spanish (L2) respectively in light of important differences between the L3 learners herein compared to what is known of the L2 Spanish performance of L1 English speakers at the same level of proficiency (see, for example, Judy et al., 2008; Rothman et al., 2010). While the present data are consistent with Flynn et al.'s (2004) Cumulative Enhancement Model, we discuss why a coupling of these data with evidence from other recent L3 studies suggests necessary modifications to this model, offering in its stead the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) for multilingual transfer.

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.

This paper investigates the role of amount of current and cumulative exposure in bilingual development and ultimate attainment by exploring the extent to which simultaneous bilingual children's knowledge of grammatical gender is affected by current and previous amount of exposure, including in the early years. Elicited production and grammaticality judgement data collected from 136 English–Dutch-speaking bilingual children aged between three and 17 years are used to examine the lexical and grammatical aspects of Dutch gender, viz. definite determiners and adjectival inflection. It is argued that the results are more consistent with a rule-based than a piecemeal approach to acquisition (Blom, Polišenskà & Weerman, 2008a; Gathercole & Thomas, 2005, 2009), and that non-target performance on the production task can be explained by the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Prévost & White, 2000; Weerman, Duijnmeijer & Orgassa, 2011).