Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the English past tense production of Chinese–English bilingual children with a matched sample of French–English bilinguals (5–12 years old). The results showed small but reliable differences in the children's past tense production (e.g., the kinds of errors the children made) that could be attributed to knowledge of the other language. Both groups of children showed equivalent rates of accuracy, suggesting that bilinguals exposed to naturalistic speech acquire the past tense much like monolinguals do, only later and with some effects, most likely morphophonological, from their other language.

This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtən] (cap~caps) but does in [bɛt]~[bɛdən] (bed~beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [kɛtən]~[kɛt] and [kɛdən]~[kɛt]). Results indicated that children's performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition.

This study assessed the prediction that individuals are able to use the knowledge from their first language (L1) in processing the comparable sound contrasts in an unknown language. Two languages, Arabic and Japanese, which utilize vowel duration contrastively, were examined. Native Arabic (NA) and native Japanese (NJ) listeners' discrimination accuracy for native (known) and nonnative (unknown) vowel length contrasts was assessed in an AXB discrimination test. A group of Australian English (OZ) speakers who do not know either Arabic or Japanese participated as a control group. Despite the expectation that native listeners positively transfer and generalize the L1 knowledge to process unknown languages with equivalent phonetic characteristics, both the NA and NJ groups were clearly less accurate in discriminating vowel length contrasts in unknown languages. Further, they showed no advantage over the OZ listeners who have limited experience with vowel length contrasts in their L1. These results suggest that, not only for stop place contrasts examined previously, but also for vowel length contrasts, experience with specific phonetic contrasts may not be sufficient for attaining truly nativelike discrimination accuracy.

The cognitive mechanisms for writing to dictation of Chinese syllables by healthy adults were investigated using large-sample multiple regression analyses. In the experiment, subjects wrote down a corresponding character upon hearing a syllable. We mainly examined the effects of three types of attributes (i.e., lexical, semantic, and phonology to orthography conversion [POC] ones) in predicting the production probability of specific characters out of the homophone families for target syllables. We observed significant effects for all three types of attributes, as well as interactions between POC and the lexical attributes, and between POC and the semantic attributes. We further found that the semantic effects vanished for the writing stimuli without homophones. A feedback procedure (i.e., phonetic radical transparency) was also observed to influence Chinese writing performances. Our results support the hypothesis that the extent of semantic involvement in writing (spelling) to dictation is influenced by the effectiveness of POC procedure in a certain language and/or word set. The existence of an interaction between the lexical semantic route and the POC route in writing is further consolidated.

Some models of semantic memory claim that items from living and nonliving domains have different feature-type profiles. Data from feature generation and perceptual modality rating tasks were compared to evaluate this claim. Results from two living (animals, fruits/vegetables) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories showed that sensorimotoric features were important in object knowledge across both domains. In addition, significant cross-domain similarities and within-domain differences indicated that feature profiles were not determined simply as a function of the living and nonliving domain distinction. The current data support a model of semantic memory rooted in perceptual and motor processes with reduced salience for the “living/nonliving” construct.

We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners’ initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding.

The current study investigated native English and native Arabic speakers’ phonological short-term memory for sequences of consonants and vowels. Phonological short-term memory was assessed in immediate serial recall tasks conducted in Arabic and English for both groups. Participants (n = 39) heard series of six consonant–vowel syllables and wrote down what they recalled. Native speakers of English recalled the vowel series better than consonant series in English and in Arabic, which was not true of native Arabic speakers. An analysis of variance showed that there was an interaction between first language and phoneme type. The results are discussed in light of current research on consonant and vowel processing.

The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native Japanese listeners and two groups of nonnative listeners with no prior pitch accent experience but differing in their native language experience with linguistic pitch: native listeners of Mandarin (a tone language with higher linguistic functional use of pitch) and native listeners of English (a stress language with lower functional use of pitch). The overall results reveal that, for both native and nonnative listeners, the processing of Japanese pitch accent is less lateralized (compared to lexical tone processing, which has been found to be a left hemisphere property). However, detailed analysis with individual pitch accents across groups shows a right hemisphere preference for processing the high–accent–low (H*L) pattern, a left hemisphere preference for LH*, and no hemisphere dominance for LH, indicating a significant reliance on the acoustic cues. These patterns are particularly prominent with the English listeners who are least experienced with linguistic pitch. Together, the findings suggest an interplay of linguistic and acoustic aspects in the processing of Japanese pitch accent by native and nonnative listeners.

This paper tests the predictions of the vocabulary-tuning model of second language (L2) rephonologization in the domain of L2 segmental production. This model proposes a facilitating effect of adults’ L2 vocabulary expansion on L2 perception and production and suggests that early improvements in L2 segmental production may be positively associated with an expanding L2 vocabulary. The model was tested in a study of the L2 vowel intelligibility of adult Japanese learners of Australian English, who differed only in the size of their L2 vocabularies. The results support the predicted association between L2 vocabulary size and L2 vowel intelligibility and the prediction that early-phase L2 vocabulary expansion leads to improved L2 production.