We present a new method for investigating children's language comprehension and argue that it has the potential to mitigate known task-related biases and expose children's grammatical and lexical knowledge in a more natural and ecologically valid manner. The new method consists of filling in a digital coloring page, according to sentence stimuli (e.g., The green monkey is being scratched by the blue monkey; The rabbit is red.). Through the playful act of coloring in the page, children reveal their interpretations of grammatical constructions and lexical items. We argue that this method gives more accurate results than existing methods, in which children are asked to choose among several pictures representing a number of possible interpretations. We present two experimental studies: one with Dutch-speaking children, tested on four types of grammatical constructions, and a second study with children learning Dutch as a second language, tested on their vocabulary knowledge. In both studies, the new method was compared with one of the most widely used methods: the picture selection task. In the first study where children's performance is said to be underestimated, the new method reveals better performance whereas in the second study where children's performance is assumed to be overestimated, the new method reveals lower performance. The results suggest therefore that the new task indeed decreases external task-related effects and offers a more reliable measurement of children's linguistic knowledge.

Previous research on the acquisition of adjunct control has observed non-adultlike behavior for sentences like “John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk.” While adults only allow a subject control interpretation for these sentences (that John tripped on the sidewalk), preschool-aged children have been reported to allow a much wider range of interpretations. A number of different tasks have been used with the aim of identifying a grammatical source of children’s errors. In this paper, we consider the role of extragrammatical factors. In two comprehension experiments, we demonstrate that error rates go up when the similarity increases between an antecedent and a linearly intervening noun phrase, first with similarity in gender, and next with similarity in number marking. This suggests that difficulties with adjunct control are to be explained (at least in part) by the sentence processing mechanisms that underlie similarity-based interference in adults.

Previous studies on children's interpretations of PRO in adjunct clauses have found that 4-to 6-year old children exhibit non-adultlike interpretations of adjunct PRO. For sentences with adjunct control, as in John bumped Mary after PRO tripping on the sidewalk, these studies have argued that children's knowledge is not adultlike. In this paper, we use a new task to reduce the demands involved in making a response. With this task, we find improved performance for sentences with adjunct control. These results suggest that children's knowledge of adjunct control is adultlike, but has been obscured by the tasks used in previous studies.

Spanish captures the difference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and contrast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this difference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. The backgrounds of the target groups differ significantly from each other in that only one of them, the Canadian group, has grown up in a societal multilingual environment. We discuss the results as being supportive of two non-mutually exclusive explanation factors: (a) French facilitates (bootstraps) the acquisition of eventive and stative passives and/or (b) the US/Canadian HS differences (e.g. status of bilingualism and the languages at stake) is a reflection of the uniqueness of the language contact situations and the effects this has on the input HSs receive.

Of course, all responsability for any errors is mine. 2 In my approach postverbal subjects occupy the position in which they are base-generated and are not the result of movement to the right. However, I will use the terms 'inversion' and 'inverted' throughout this article for ease of exposition.