This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enroll...

The learnability of center-embedded recursive structures has attracted much attention (Corballis, 2007; Friederici, 2004; Rey, Perruchet, & Fagot, 2012). However, most of the previous studies adopted the artificial grammar learning paradigm (Reber, 1967) and did not apply natural language stimuli. Rather, they applied synthetic meaningless training materials, which hardly represent the richness...

Long-distance dependencies in center-embedded recursion are among the most typical but also most difficult structures in human language (Corballis, 2007; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). Concerning the impact of the learning sample on grasping object-action relations, there are two opposing arguments: more is better vs. fewer is better (Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Brandone, 2008). The fo...

The present study presents results from picture description, sentence completion and grammaticality judgment tasks with four MA-speaking Broca’s aphasic subjects and four age, sex, and education matched control subjects investigating tense and agreement markers. Specifically, the study explores tense and agreement disassociation in agrammatic speakers of Moroccan Arabic as predicted by the Tree...

This study investigates the impact of three types of focus-on-form instruction (FFI) on learners’ reading comprehension and their development of the English past unreal conditional. The study also investigates whether the learners’ grammar development is implicit or explicit in nature. Fifty-one intermediate-level ESL learners were distributed into three groups. Each group read passages with di...

Although very young children process ongoing language quickly and effortlessly, research indicates that they continue to improve and mature in their language skills through adolescence. This prolonged development may be related to differing engagement of semantic and syntactic processes. This study used event related potentials and time frequency analysis of EEG to identify developmental differ...

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax– semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at the interface between lexical semantics and synta...

■ A direct investigation into the grammatical abilities of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics sought to obtain critical evidence for a revised model of the functional neuroanatomy of language. We examined aphasics’ ability to make grammaticality judgments on a set of theoretically selected, highly complex syntactic structures that involve, most prominently, ane violations of constraints on syntact...

This article examines the role of subjective familiarity in the implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Experiment 1 found that objective measures of similarity (including fragment frequency and repetition structure) predicted ratings of familiarity, that familiarity ratings predicted grammaticality judgments, and that the extremity of familiarity ratings predicted confidence. Fa...