Bringing together lines of research from sentence processing and lexical access, this empirical study investigates the interplay between lexical (grammatical gender) and syntactic (word order) cross-linguistic overlap in L2 German. Eighty-six L1 Spanish-L2 German and thirty-six monolingual German adults completed a German self-paced reading task with noun phrases (NPs) manipulated by L1-L2 gender congruency (congruent, incongruent, neuter) and L1-L2 adjective-noun word order (pre- vs. postnominal adjectives). The study examines the effects of gender congruency, the type of L1-L2 gender mapping (i.e., presence vs. absence of each class in L1 and L2), and L2 proficiency level. Results show that the detection of ungrammatical word order in L2 German interacts with gender congruency, in that L2 speakers are only sensitive to word order violations for sentences with gender-congruent nouns. The detection of ungrammaticality for sentences containing gender-incongruent nouns only emerges at higher L2 proficiency levels. These findings underscore the role of cross-linguistic lexical overlap in syntactic processing.

This article investigates whether human masculine plural noun phrases (NPs) in Spanish, which can be interpreted with an exclusively masculine or a mixed-gender meaning, are a case of balanced or unbalanced ambiguity. The results of an experiment using a sentence continuation task with oral stimuli are consistent with the claim that masculine grammatical gender biases listeners toward an exclusively masculine interpretation. The acceptance rate of continuations with the pronoun uno/una referring to a masculine plural antecedent showed that the exclusively masculine meaning of the NP is accessed more frequently and involves a lower cognitive cost than the mixed-gender interpretation. Further, this effect interacts with the stereotypicality of the noun: nouns independently established to carry a masculine stereotype are less likely to be associated with a mixed-gender interpretation. The study also found that the speakers’ attitudes toward nonsexist language predict their acceptance of the mixed-gender interpretation of masculine NPs.

Although the importance of prosody in processing information structure (IS) has been shown in many languages including English and Mandarin, the interacting effects of prosody with other linguistic systems, such as syntax, are relatively under-studied, especially in L2. This paper reports two question-answer appropriateness rating experiments, investigating intermediate-to-high proficiency Mandarin listeners’ integration of prosodic prominence and clefting cues in the interpretation of focus in their L1 and L2 (English). It was found that prosodic prominence was more effective than clefting as a cue to focus in L1 Mandarin. However, clefting was as effective as prominence in L2, showing L1–L2 differences in integrating multiple cues. The findings are discussed in terms of Mennen’s L2 intonation learning theory (2015) and Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1989), which provide a framework for understanding difficulties in acquiring the use of particular cues in L2. The current study contributes to our limited knowledge of a crucial part of L2 learning: how L2 learners process IS.

The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbitnominative … the carrotaccusative eatfuture vs. the fast rabbitaccusative … the foxnominative eatfuture) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children’s early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children’s morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.

This study examined the role of first language (L1) transparency in intra-orthographic effects on second language (L2) pronunciation by studying L2 learners with a non-alphabetic and orthographically opaque L1 and an alphabetic L2. Relations between orthographic effects, phonological awareness, and L2 proficiency were examined. Fifty-four Cantonese-speaking English as a second language (ESL) learners participated in Experiment 1 with orthographic effect tasks (homophone and silent-letter read-aloud) and phonological awareness tasks. Thirty Cantonese-speaking and 30 Mandarin-speaking ESL learners participated in Experiment 2 with orthographic effect tasks and an L2 proficiency task. The L2 pronunciation of Cantonese and Mandarin participants was subjected to intra-orthographic effects. Phonological awareness and L2 proficiency were associated with less orthographic effects on L2 pronunciation in Cantonese participants. Mandarin participants did not subject to more orthographic effects than Cantonese participants when controlling L2 proficiency, implying that shared alphabetic scripts between Pinyin and English did not interfere with L2 production. Overall, transferring the L1 reading strategy that relies on orthography to decode phonology to L2 reading seemed not to be the key mechanism behind intra-orthographic effects. L2 graphemes were likely to be decoded with incorrect L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, resulting in intra-orthographic effects.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show heterogeneous language profiles beyond early language delays. Understanding the second language profiles of bilingual children with ASD is important for clinical practice in diverse societies. Accordingly, we examined the narrative abilities of bilinguals with ASD, with developmental language disorder (DLD), and with typical development (TD) to determine which narrative components best differentiate bilinguals with ASD from the other groups. Participants were 29 bilingual children with ASD, DLD, and TD who were matched for age (mean = 6;8), nonverbal intelligence, and receptive vocabulary. Narratives were coded for macrostructure (story grammar (SG) scores, number of individual SG components) and microstructure (syntactic complexity, mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and story length). The TD group had superior SG scores, included more SG components, and used longer utterances and more complex syntax than the ASD group, whereas no differences were found between the clinical groups. For SG components requiring perspective-taking abilities, the ASD group had worse performance than the TD and DLD groups. Our results suggest that bilingual children with ASD show weaknesses in both macrostructure and microstructure, which can overlap with children with DLD. The linguistic profiles of bilingual children with ASD and DLD are thus both overlapping and distinct.