Previous research suggests that native speakers quickly adapt to the properties of the language in the surrounding context. For instance, as they repeatedly read a structure that is initially nonpreferred or infrequent, they show a reduction of processing difficulty. Adaptation has been accounted for in terms of error-based learning: the error resulting from the difference between the expected and actual input leads to an adjustment of the knowledge representation, which changes future expectations. The present study tested whether experiencing an error is sufficient for adaptation. We compared native English speakers and second language (L2) learners’ processing of, and adaptation to, two types of temporarily ambiguous structures that were resolved toward the nonpreferred interpretation. Whereas both native English and L2 speakers showed increased reading times at the disambiguating word versus a nonambiguous control, our data suggest that only native English speakers adapted, and only to one of the two structures. These results suggest that experiencing an error is not sufficient for adaptation, and that factors such as ease of revision and task effects may play a role as well.

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This paper investigates two of the most widely analysed universals in translation research, namely simplification and explicitation. We examine the oral production of bilingual children with different language pairs as available in the CHILDES project (MacWhinney 2000) (i.e. the FerFuLice, Ticio, Deuchar, Vila, Genesee and Pérez-Bazán corpora) as well as in other compilation forms (i.e. Ronjat 1913; Leopold 1939–1949; Swain 1972; Lanza 1988, 1997, 2001; Cossato 2008). We address two main issues: whether instances of simplification and explicitation appear in the production of non-instructed interpreters and, if so, how their occurrence relates to the type of data (i.e. spontaneous or experimental) and the language pair involved. The results show that children acquiring two first languages often translate and use simplification and explicitation at varying degrees irrespective of the language pair. We conclude that the analysis of acquisition data can contribute to shed light on the nature of these translation universals.

Bilingual children as interpreters in everyday life: how natural interpreting reinforces minority languagesChildren that grow up bilingually often interpret naturally between their two languages. This has been shown to be so in a variety of language pairs, regardless of children's social and family situations and both within the family context as well as between the family and society (e.g. Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes 2015; Angelelli 2016).This study analyses different contextual and linguistic variables that define the natural interpreting instances produced in spontaneous interactions by 19 young bilingual children (average age: 3;7) with different language pairs. In particular, we aim at characterizing the bilingual practice used by these children and (i) involve the consecutive use of their two languages and (ii) are shaped by the communicative strategies used by parents at home. The analysis is based on freely available corpora in

We analyze the emergence of grammatical gender in the spontaneous longitudinal Spanish production of a set of Spanish/English bilingual twins from the FerFuLice corpus (Fernández Fuertes & Liceras 2009). We take as a point of departure theoretical accounts on gender assignment and gender concord and previous empirical work on the acquisition of gender by monolinguals and bilinguals. Our study deals with how gender incorporates in the case of L1 Spanish bilinguals; how concord within the determiner phrase (DP) operates; and how monolingual and bilingual Spanish pattern in the same way in this respect. We conclude that DP syntax and the gender concord valuation mechanism are in place from very early stages and that morphology and semantics are not determinant factors in this process.