An Event Related Field Study of Rapid Grammatical Plasticity in Adult Second-Language Learners.

The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate how Spanish adult learners of Basque respond to morphosyntactic violations after a short period of training on a small fragment of Basque grammar. Participants ( = 17) were exposed to violation and control phrases in three phases (pretest, training, generalization-test). In each phase participants listened to short Basque phrases and they judged whether they were correct or incorrect.

Is there a bilingual advantage in the ANT task? Evidence from children.

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that do not tap into linguistic processes. The origin of this bilingual advantage has been questioned in recent years. While some authors argue that the reason behind this apparent advantage is bilinguals' enhanced executive functioning, inhibitory skills and/or monitoring abilities, other authors suggest that the locus of these differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may lie in uncontrolled factors or incorrectly matched samples.

An event-related potential study on changes of violation and error responses during morphosyntactic learning.

Based on recent findings showing electrophysiological changes in adult language learners after relatively short periods of training, we hypothesized that adult Dutch learners of German would show responses to German gender and adjective declension violations after brief instruction. Adjective declension in German differs from previously studied morphosyntactic regularities in that the required suffixes depend not only on the syntactic case, gender, and number features to be expressed, but also on whether or not these features are already expressed on linearly preceding elements in the noun phrase. Violation phrases and matched controls were presented over three test phases (pretest and training on the first day, and a posttest one week later).

Stroop interference, practice, and aging.

We report two experiments that investigate practice effects on Stroop color-word interference in older and younger adults. Both experiments employed a computerized, single-item version of the Stroop task with a voice response, and both involved practice over hundreds of trials. Both experiments showed generally similar practice patterns, including a practice-related reduction in the size of the color-word interference effect.

Age preservation of the syntactic processor in production.

Two experiments are reported on the influence of cognitive aging on grammatical choice in language production. In both experiments, participants from two age-groups (young and old) produced sentences in a formulation task (V. Ferreira, 1996) that contrasted conditions allowing a choice between alternative sentence arrangements (i.