<div><div><div><p>The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the United States (N = 53) to measure the effects of an early, oral-based versus a late, written-based exposure to the target language. Results from a sentence completion task show comparable behavior across all groups in the four verb conditions, with a strong tendency to favor the no climbing (enclisis) option, and a proficiency effect among the experimental groups. Results of an acceptability judgment task show comparable behavior across all groups, accepting grammatical proclitic placement and rejecting ungrammatical sentences with climbing. Neither proficiency or group effects were found in this task, although the judgments of the experimental groups were less categorical compared to the native speakers’. The combined results of these two tasks point to an absence of age or input effects in the L2 acquisition of this syntactic phenomenon in Spanish. </p></div></div></div>

This study examines the interaction between language experience and Spanish morphosyntactic development using longitudinal data of Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Specifically, this study explores how language exposure and usage influence the production accuracy of articles, direct object clitics and subjunctives across 4 years. Analyses of growth trajectories show that the trajectories differ by both language ability groups and morphosyntactic structures. Among the three grammatical markers, the TD group demonstrates different patterns of growth while the DLD group demonstrates consistent ascending trajectories. The accuracy of articles is the highest in all three markers across 4 years for both TD and DLD groups. The accuracy of direct object clitics in the DLD group increases over time while it decreases slightly in the TD group. The accuracy of subjunctives increases in both TD and DLD groups, but the increase was higher in the DLD group than in the TD group. Results of the generalized linear model (GLM) of the accuracy of three grammatical markers indicate that the contributing factors differ by the marker: language exposure, language usage, language ability group and grade level have significant effects on accuracy of articles; language ability group is the only contributing factor to the production accuracy of direct object clitics; and language exposure, language ability group and grade level significantly influence the production accuracy of subjunctives. Results of the GLM of accuracy at the fourth assessment time also reveal that contributing factors to accuracy of fourth-year performance differ by grammatical markers: a significant effect of accuracy at first observation time for articles and direct object clitics, a significant effect of baseline accuracy for articles and subjunctives, and a significant effect of language ability for subjunctives. These results confirm that articles, direct object clitics and subjunctives are reliable markers of language impairment for Spanish-English bilingual children. This study also describes the specific influence of language experience within the language ability group and grade level. The influence of language experience on production accuracy differs by language ability group and morphosyntactic structures. / Communication Sciences

Bien que les troubles du langage formel affectent une grande partie des enfants avec Trouble du Spectre Autistique (TSA), leur nature reste encore incertaine. Certaines études postulent que le trouble observable chez ces enfants est de même nature que celui dont souffrent les enfants avec trouble spécifique du langage (TSL), tandis que d’autres argumentent en faveur de deux troubles qui diffèrent dans leur étiologie. Au centre de ce débat réside la complexité à recueillir des données sur le langage chez les enfants avec TSA, notamment quand il s’agit de participer de manière active. Dans cette étude, nous explorons l’interprétation en temps réel des indices grammaticaux chez des enfants avec TSA monolingues francophones, en nous intéressant aux pronoms clitiques objets, dont la faible production en contexte obligatoire a été proposée comme marqueur du TSL pour le français. / It is well-known that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have language impairment. However, the nature of this impairment is still largely unknown. Some studies hold that language impairment in children with ASD is of the same nature as impairment found in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), whereas others argue that SLI and language impairment in ASD may be different both in their structure and their etiology. At the heart of this debate lies the difficulty of assessing language abilities of children with ASD, especially when active participation is required. Moreover, to date, few studies have investigated formal aspects of language in children with ASD in languages other than English. In this study, we explore real-time interpretation of grammatical cues in French-speaking children with ASD, with a focus on object clitics.