This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations. Participants completed a comprehension task with ...

The scientific method is a process of conjecture (hypothesis generation), prediction and subsequent testing in an effort to gain greater understanding. By its very nature, then, it is a process where, much more often than not, theoretical contributions are destined to be wrong. Somewhat ironically, though, being wrong is essentially the goal. By initially assuming our theory – or the one(s) we are ...

The present study uses event-related potentials to examine subject–verb person agreement in Spanish, with a focus on how markedness with respect to the speech participant status of the subject modulates processing. Morphological theory proposes a markedness distinction between first and second person, on the one hand, and third person on the other. The claim is that both the first and second persons ...

The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect writing, P600 effects for number agreement were significantly ...

Cognitively demanding experiences, including complex skills acquisition and processing, have been shown to induce brain adaptations, at least at the macroscopic level, e.g. on brain volume and/or functional connectivity. However, the neurobiological bases of these adaptations, including at the cellular level, are unclear and understudied. Here we use bilingualism as a case study to investigate the ...

The earliest investigations of the neural implementation of language started with examining patients with various types of disorders and underlying brain damage. The advent of neuroimaging tools in the twentieth century drastically changed the landscape of the field of the (cognitive) neuroscience of language, expanding the variety and depth of research questions one could ask without being ...

<b>Aims: </b>Over the past decade in particular, formal linguistic work within L3 acquisition has concentrated on hypothesizing and empirically determining the source of transfer from previous languages—L1, L2 or both—in L3 grammatical representations. In view of the progressive concern with more advanced stages, we aim to show that focusing on L3 initial stages should be one continued priority of ...

Prior to the early 1960s, the idea that children in bilingual contexts were somehow disadvantaged for linguistic and cognitive development was popularly held. Without consideration of socio-economic inequalities across groups, often co-occurring with ethnic/racial minority status, it was argued that simultaneous language exposure resulted in confusion, delaying the process of language acquisition ...

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 ...