The present study investigates the real-time costs of sentence processing in early Spanish–English bilinguals. Our results indicate that bilinguals use an amalgam (a combination of L1 and L2 strategies) of monolingual strategies in choosing the agent of a sentence. The reaction time (RT) data, however, reveal a slightly larger language specific component than the choice data. That is, bilinguals appear to fall more “in between” the two monolingual groups in their choice profiles than in their RT profiles. This implies that early bilinguals may be paying a language-specific processing cost in order to maintain an “in between” profile. The nature of the bilingual/monolingual dichotomy and its implications for the study of bilingual language processing are discussed.

Weinreich (1953) distinguished three types of bilingualism: the compound, the coordinate, and the subordinative. In this article, we use his partition to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. In order to do so, two relatively closely related varieties were used, standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht. Subjects had to carry out an auditory lexical decision task using the repetition priming paradigm. Stimuli under investigation were cognates and noncognates. There were two age groups (13 and 17 years old) and two language backgrounds (standard Dutch and Maastricht dialect). The results indicated no differences depending on age. With regard to language background, no interlingual repetition priming was found for the dialect speakers. However, in contrast with earlier findings on visual repetition priming, there were interlingual repetition effects not only for the cognates, but also for the noncognates when the standard speakers were concerned. Therefore, we concluded that, at least in the auditory modality, the dialect speakers in question are coordinate bilinguals and the standard speakers are subordinative bilinguals. Finally, it is shown that Weinreich's model in his pure form leads to unexplainable processes in language acquisition. For that reason, his distinctions are incorporated into the lexico-semantic model of Levelt (1989).

This study examined the comprehension of English conventional indirect requests by native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Subjects read stories inducing either a conventional or a literal interpretation of a priming sentence. Reading speeds did not vary as a function of the interpretation. Subsequent target sentences that paraphrased either the literal or the conventional interpretation of the prime sentence were read more quickly when they paraphrased a conventional interpretation of the sentence than when they paraphrased a literal interpretation. Target sentences were also read more quickly if they paraphrased the interpretation induced by the context than if they did not match. The results suggest that both native and nonnative speakers process both meanings of an ambiguous conventional request.

Speech samples from twelve 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) were analyzed. The feature deficit hypothesis maintains that SLI children may produce morphological markers (e.g., plural -s) correctly, but they do not appreciate their role in marking grammatical features. Rather, they treat them as meaningless phonological variants. Findings from the present study were incompatible with this hypothesis: (a) production of morphological markers was not random; errors were unidirectional, in almost all cases involving omission of an inflection in an obligatory context; (b) overregularization errors were sometimes observed; (c) grammatical features differed in difficulty; (d) substitution of stems for inflected forms occurred with irregular as well as regular verbs; and (e) errors of pronoun case marking were common and always involved producing an accusative form in a context demanding the nominative. Children who used a specific inflectional form correctly in some utterances omitted it in others, suggesting a limitation of performance rather than competence. There were few obvious differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms, though there was a trend for grammatical errors to occur on words that occurred later in an utterance. It is suggested that slowed processing in a limited capacity system that is handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of grammatical morphemes.

This research investigates the independent and interactive effects of contextual and definitional information on vocabulary learning. German students of English received either a text with unfamiliar English words or their monolingual English dictionary entries. A third group of subjects were given both text and dictionary entries. Subjects used each target word in an English sentence and then translated their sentences into German. The translations showed whether students had understood the meaning of a target word and permitted the specification of comprehension strategies. Subjects who had received text and dictionary entries tended to favor the dictionary and thus performed no better than students in the other experimental groups. Subjects learning words from context replaced unfamiliar words with familiar words conforming to contextual constraints. Subjects in the dictionary group commonly substituted a relevant part of the definition for the headword. Lexical errors occurred for different reasons: substitutions in the dictionary condition were unconstrained by context; substitutions in the text condition were not sufficiently constrained by context. The study shows that information about the contexts in which words are used is crucial for acquiring an adequate understanding of word meanings.1