This paper presents an experimental study investigating the development of a flexible word order in early bilingual (2L) acquisition as opposed to monolingual (L1) acquisition 1 . In particular, it concerns the acquisition of direct object scrambling as a means of encoding specificity/definiteness by monolingual Ukrainian and bilingual English-Ukrainian children. Research within the last twenty...

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax ...

Most studies involving trilingualism have been carried out within the theoretical framework of bilingualism research. No attempt has been made to delimit trilingualism as a concept in its own right, and often it has been assumed to be an extension of bilingualism. In young children, trilingual language acquisition largely follows the path of bilingual acquisition. With regard to language behavi...

Children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) experience a delay in acquisition of certain language skills, with no evidence of hearing impediments, or other cognitive, behavioral, or overt neurological problems (Leonard, 1991; Paradis et al., 2005/6). Standardized tests, such as the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment, have shown to have great predictive value for assessing Engl...

This paper presents a new learning method for automatic acquisition of translation knowledge from parallel corpora. We apply this learning method to automatic extraction of bilingual word pairs from parallel corpora. In general, similarity measures are used to extract bilingual word pairs from parallel corpora. However, similarity measures are insufficient because of the sparse data problem. Th...

Bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 110 heterogeneous bilingual young adults. These questions concern participants' language use, acquisition history and self-reported proficiency. The questionnaire responses and performances on...

For the purpose of overcoming resource scarcity bottleneck in corpus-based translation knowledge acquisition research, this paper takes an approach of semi-automatically acquiring domain specific translation knowledge from the collection of bilingual news articles on WWW news sites. This paper presents results of applying standard co-occurrence frequency based techniques of estimating bilingual...

Children acquire their native language according to a well-defined time frame. Surprisingly, although children raised in bilingual environments have to learn roughly twice as much about language as their monolingual peers, the speed of acquisition is comparable in monolinguals and bilinguals. Here, we show that preverbal 12-month-old bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speec...

A primary tenet underlying American Sign Language/English bilingual education for deaf students is that early access to a visual language, developed in conjunction with language planning principles, provides a foundation for literacy in English. The goal of this study is to obtain an emic perspective on bilingual deaf readers transitioning from learning to read to reading to learn. Analysis of ...

How do bilingual learners acquire a structured representation for the two lexicons at early stages of lexical acquisition? In this study, we attempt to address this question with Devlex-II, a self-organizing connectionist model. Previous connectionist simulations suggest that bilingual lexical representations may be functionally separate, but architecturally homogeneous (Li & Farkas, 2002). Her...