Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language learners (N = 203), felt that they gestured more after one year of language instruction. A longitudinal study confirmed this perception. Twenty-one ASL learners and 20 Romance language learners (French, Italian, Spanish) were filmed re-telling a cartoon story before and after one academic year of language instruction. Only the ASL learners exhibited an increase in gesture rate, an increase in the production of iconic gestures, and an increase in the number of handshape types exploited in co-speech gesture. Five ASL students also produced at least one ASL sign when re-telling the cartoon. We suggest that learning ASL may (i) lower the neural threshold for co-speech gesture production, (ii) pose a unique challenge for language control, and (iii) have the potential to improve cognitive processes that are linked to gesture.

This longitudinal quasi-experimental study examines the effects of Word Generation, a middle-school vocabulary intervention, on the learning, maintenance, and consolidation of academic vocabulary for students from English-speaking homes, proficient English speakers from language-minority homes, and limited English-proficiency students. Using individual growth modeling, we found that students receiving Word Generation improved more on target word knowledge during the instructional period than students in comparison schools did, on average. We found an interaction between instruction and home-language status such that English-proficient students from language-minority homes improved more than English-proficient students from English-speaking homes. Limited English-proficiency students, however, did not realize gains equivalent to those of more proficient students from language-minority homes during the instructional period. We administered follow-up assessments in the fall after the instructional period ended and in the spring of the following year to determine how well students maintained and consolidated target academic words. Students in the intervention group maintained their relative improvements at both follow-up assessments.

In this study, we investigate whether preposition stranding, a stereotypical non-standard feature of North American French, results from convergence with English, and the role of bilingual code-switchers in its adoption and diffusion. Establishing strict criteria for the validation of contact-induced change, we make use of the comparative variationist framework, first to situate stranding with respect to the other options for preposition placement with which it coexists in the host language grammar, and then to confront the variable constraints on stranding across source and host languages, contact and pre-contact stages of the host language, mainstream and “bilingual” varieties of the source language, and copious and sparse code-switchers. Detailed comparison with a superficially similar pre-existing native language construction also enables us to assess the possibility of a language-internal model for preposition stranding. Systematic quantitative analyses turned up several lines of evidence militating against the interpretation of convergence. Most compelling are the findings that the conditions giving rise to stranding in French are the same as those operating to produce the native strategy, while none of them are operative in the presumed source. Explicit comparison of copious vs. sparse code-switchers revealed no difference between them, refuting claims that the former are agents of convergence. Results confirm that surface similarities may mask deeper differences, a crucial finding for the study of contact-induced change.

The demographic changes in the Western world in the last two decades have led to rapid growth in the number of children being raised bilingually, and in many locations they represent a majority of the school population. With this increase in the number of bilingual children, researchers as well as educators and practitioners, face a diagnostic dilemma which arises from similarities in the linguistic manifestations of child second language (L2) acquisition and of Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This dilemma has motivated a new field of research, the study of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment (BISLI), which aims at disentangling the effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment. The majority of the studies are currently focused on morphosyntax as a key direction of research. The present issue, which originated in papers presented at a scientific workshop funded by the Israel Science Foundation and The Hebrew University's Center for Advanced Study, held in February 2009, aims at broadening this area of research to other linguistic domains.

Longitudinal word learning studies which control for experience can advance understanding of language learning and potential intra- and inter-language relationships in developing bilinguals. We examined novel word learning in both the first (L1) and the second (L2) languages of bilingual children. The rate and shape of change as well as the role of existing vocabulary in new word learning were of primary interest. Participants were 32 three-to-five-year old children. All participants had Hmong as their L1 and English as their L2. A novel word learning paradigm was used to measure children's acquisition of new form–meaning associations in L1 and L2 over eight weekly training sessions (four in each language). Two-level hierarchical linear models were used to analyze change in the comprehension and production of new words in Hmong and English over time. Results showed that there were comparable linear gains in novel word comprehension and production in both the L1 and the L2, despite different starting points. Success in novel word learning was predicted to some extent by existing vocabulary knowledge within each language. Between-language relationships were both positive and negative. These findings are consistent with highly interactive dynamic theories of sequential bilingual language learning.

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses (il veut pas payer pour ça ~ il veut pas payer pour “he doesn't want to pay for [it]”) and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative clauses (j'avais pas personne avec qui parler ~ j'avais pas personne à parler avec “I had no one to whom to talk ~ I had no one to talk to”). In main clauses, the variant lacking the adjacent complement is said to have an orphaned preposition (il veut pas payer pour); in relatives, it is said to have a stranded preposition (j'avais pas personne à parler avec). In popular spoken French in Canada, stranding appears to be much more frequent than in other Francophone areas. Because so many French speakers in Canada are bilingual, because of the high frequency of stranding, and no doubt also because stranding violates prescriptive norms, stranded prepositions in French in Canada are widely believed to be instances of English influence (e.g. j'avais pas personne à parler avec is regarded as modeled on I had no one to talk to). But in a masterly variationist treatment, Poplack, Zentz and Dion (2011, this issue) argue that Canadian stranding is not of English origin. Stranded Canadian prepositions represent, instead, the expansion to relative clauses of the ordinary main-clause orphans. The historical source for Canadian stranding is thus analogy-induced and internal (French orphans), not contact-induced and external (not English stranding).

This study investigates the production and online processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty-nine six- to nine-year-old L2 children and twenty-eight typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person -s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001) and participated in an online word monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person -s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive -ing, possessive 's) morphemes. The L2 children's performance on the online task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery and Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non-target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on attrition in L1 speech (de Leeuw, Mennen & Scobbie, in press; de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010; Dmitrieva, Jongman & Sereno, 2010; Mennen, 2004). Adding to this line of inquiry, the present study investigates the speech of a 62-year-old bilingual monozygotic twin who emigrated to an L2-speaking environment 30 years ago. Changes in L1 accent were assessed by comparing her speech to that of her identical twin sister who remained in the L1-speaking environment, thus providing a unique control setting. Acoustic analyses of voice onset time and vowels indicate pervasive changes to the emigrated twin's L1 accent, with attrition presenting in the form of cross-linguistic assimilation patterns. Interestingly, her L1 vowel space exhibited a systematic increase in first formant frequency, confirming claims that L1 and L2 sounds may be related to each other at a system-wide level (Chang, 2010, 2011; Guion, 2003). Implications for theoretical models of bilingual sound systems are discussed.

This study examined object clitic pronouns (OCPs) and verb inflections in twenty-five school-age children with typical development (TD) and twenty children with bilingual language impairment (BLI). MANOVA and ANOVA were used to explore differences according to grade level and language status (TD vs. BLI). Although children with BLI produced higher rates of grammatical errors overall, accuracy on number and gender assignment for OCPs was better for both groups in the higher grades. Although the rate of verb inflection errors did not differ for children with TD and BLI in the lower grades, a significant interaction yielded higher error rates on subject–verb agreement for third person singular and plural inflections in the later grades for children with BLI. Greater accuracy on OCP use in later grades weakens claims that bilingualism exacerbates language impairment. For BLI, whether incomplete acquisition or delayed development is the determining factor for verb inflection errors remains undetermined.

Previous studies have indicated that bilingualism may facilitate lexical learning in adults. The goals of this research were (i) to examine whether bilingual influences on word learning diverge for phonologically-familiar and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, and (ii) to examine whether increased phonological memory capacity can account for bilingual effects on word learning. In Experiment 1, participants learned phonologically-familiar novel words that were constructed using the phonemes of English – the native language for all participants. In Experiment 2, participants learned phonologically-unfamiliar novel words that included non-English phonemes. In each experiment, bilingual adults were contrasted with two groups of monolingual adults: a high memory-span monolingual group (that matched bilinguals on phonological memory performance) and a low-span monolingual group. Results showed that bilingual participants in both experiments outperformed monolingual participants, both high-span and low-span. High-span monolinguals outperformed low-span monolinguals when learning phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, but not when learning phonologically-familiar novel words. The findings suggest that the bilingual advantage for novel word learning is not contingent on the phonological properties of novel words, and that phonological memory capacity as measured here cannot account for the bilingual effects on learning.

The authors of ‘Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence’, Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses cannot be qualified as a case of grammatical convergence due to language contact with English, but that it rather turns out to be a result of analogical extension of a native French strategy, preposition orphaning, to a new context. The application of a particularly sound and accountable methodology, the comparative method of variationist sociolinguistics (Poplack & Meechan, 1998; Tagliamonte, 2002), allows them to invalidate the hypothesis of a causal relationship between contact and the phenomenon under study.

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998; Zagona, 2002); i.e., personal a is conditioned by the interpretability of semantic features. Forty-nine English L2 learners of Spanish of three different proficiency levels, and 16 Spanish controls took part in a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgement Task. These revealed that L2 learners of Spanish of all proficiency levels behaved differently from native speakers of Spanish. The L2 learners appear to have acquired some of the interpretable features (i.e., [±animate]), but show delays with others. Nonetheless, our data show partial convergence by advanced learners with the native speakers: some features are acquirable, while others may be less accessible and subject to developmental processes. In explaining our data we appeal to Lardiere's (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, but assess it critically and aim to develop it further by considering the complexity constraints in terms of the number of features involved and their configuration.

Neighborhood density – the number of words that sound similar to a given word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998) – influences word learning in native English-speaking children and adults (Storkel, 2004; Storkel, Armbruster & Hogan, 2006): novel words with many similar sounding English words (i.e., dense neighborhood) are learned more quickly than novel words with few similar sounding English words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). The present study examined how neighborhood density influences word learning in native English-speaking adults learning Spanish as a foreign language. Students in their third semester of Spanish-language classes learned advanced Spanish words that sounded similar to many known Spanish words (i.e., dense neighborhood) or sounded similar to few known Spanish words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). In three word-learning tasks, performance was better for Spanish words with dense rather than sparse neighborhoods. These results suggest that a similar mechanism may be used to learn new words in a native and a foreign language.

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject–object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish whose native language was a non-null subject language like English. Twenty-three near-native and 33 native readers of Mexican Spanish read sentences like Cuando el escultor acabó/volvió la obra tenía tres metros de altura “When the sculptor finished/came back the piece was three meters in height”. The results suggest that (i) Spanish differs from English for this type of processing and (ii) native and near-native processing can be guided by largely similar principles, at least where lexical information like verb transitivity is concerned.

This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject–verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish–German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns of impairment in the two participant groups. Both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI had correct (present vs. preterit) tense marking and produced syntactically complex sentences such as embedded clauses and wh-questions, but were limited in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. These contrasts indicate that agreement marking is impaired in German-speaking children with SLI, without any necessary concurrent deficits in either the CP-domain or in tense marking. Our results also show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early successive bilingual child's performance in one of her two languages.

Despite increasing attention to bilingualism – conferences, publications, grants – linguists are as far as ever from reaching consensus. Is code-switching the alternation between two equally activated languages or is it the insertion of elements from a source language into a recipient language? Can and should we distinguish borrowing and code-switching of single words? Is there grammatical convergence between bilinguals’ two languages and does code-switching promote it? Since the first accounts of the structure of code-switching in the 1970s, the same questions have been readdressed with astoundingly little, if any, cumulative advances. Scientific progress has been obstructed by polemic debate, often fueled by elicited judgments, which may display random error (Labov, 1996), or reports of the behavior of stray individuals, which are uninterpretable in the absence of knowledge of the systematic community pattern (Labov, 2006/1966, p. 5).

Research on word production in bilinguals has often shown an advantage for cognate words. According to some accounts, this cognate effect is caused by feedback from a level that represents information about phonemes (or graphemes) to a level concerned with the word. In order to investigate whether phonological feedback influences the selection of words and syntactic constructions in late bilinguals, we investigated syntactic priming between Dutch and English genitive constructions (e.g., the fork of the girl vs. the girl's fork). The head nouns of prime and target constructions were always translation equivalents. Half of these were Dutch–English cognates with a large phonological overlap (e.g., vork–fork), the other half were non-cognates that had very few phonemes in common (e.g., eend–duck). Cognate status boosted between-language syntactic priming. Further analyses showed a continuous effect of phonological overlap for cognates and non-cognates, indicating that this boost was at least partly caused by feedback from the translation equivalents’ shared phonemes.

Ouh que c'est laid! “Oh this is ugly!” is one of the comments among the 11,800 hits on Google for the sequence “la fille que je sors avec” [the girl I go out with]. Often the comments include the idea that the whole expression has been taken from English as a direct calque. The authors of the present keynote article, Poplack, Zentz and Dion (Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue), argue convincingly that this type of preposition stranding in Canadian French cannot be ascribed to language contact with English. Using sound and accountable methodology, derived from the research paradigm of variationist sociolinguistics, they manage to disprove the hypothesis of a direct causal link between the expression in Canadian French and its supposed earlier use in English. Thus, an icon of language contact, both in popular perception and in many not-so-well-informed academic sources, has been shattered.

This study investigates definite articles in specific and generic subject nominals in Italian spoken by adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) and second language learners (L2ers). The study focuses on plural and mass DPs, in which German and Italian differ. The aims are to (i) compare acquisition outcomes between the weaker and the stronger language in 2L1 acquisition, (ii) see in a comparison with L2ers whether the phenomenon under investigation, which is typically acquired late (after age 6;0), lacks age of onset effects, and (iii) discuss predictions for the directionality of cross-linguistic influence. Twenty German–Italian 2L1ers and 15 advanced L2ers of Italian with German as their native language were tested in an acceptability judgment task and a truth value judgment task. The results show clear differences between Italian as the weaker and as the stronger language in 2L1 acquisition, and similarities between Italian as L2 and as the weaker language in 2L1 acquisition.

Two studies investigated five- and six-year-old preschool children's narrative production in an attempt to show how LI may impinge on narrative production in measurable ways. Study 1 analyzed renderings of familiar stories for group (typical language development vs. language impairment), story content (Jungle Book/Goldilocks) and language (English/Hebrew) differences on a range of discourse (story grammar categories), lexical (e.g., words, word types), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections, prepositions) and bilingual (code-switching) measures. It showed intact performance for narrative structure in both groups and in both languages despite differences in lexis, morphosyntax and bilingualism. Study 2 pursued bilingual code-switching as a means to examine differences between children with typical language development (TLD) and language impairment (LI) in a retelling task where each child retold three stories (from native language/L1, second language/L2 and bilingual contexts) to interlocutors with different language preferences. Both groups showed sociolinguistic sensitivity in code-switching behavior, but frequency and directionality of code-switching revealed group differences. The article argues for the use of a range of indicators of LI including those unique to bilingual children.