A project of this nature and size involves the cooperation of many people to whom we are indebted and owe much gratitude. We wish to thank all the children and their parents for their enthusiasm and participation over the years; it was a pleasure to see your development and growth-much more than just in your language. To the teachers and especially the administration at the Colegio Berchmans, we cannot thank you enough. Finally and most notably, a very large thank you to Eliana Herrera Laguna, the director of bilingual education at Colegio Berchmans, whose love for these children and belief in using scientific research to support bilingual education are inspiring. This article is for all of you. We are also very grateful for the funding for this project, which came over the years from the University of Iowa, the University of Florida and the University of Reading. Many research assistants over the course of the 5 years of the project contributed to the processing of the data, specifically the transcripts of the interviews at the outset of the project and we are of course thankful for their help. Many colleagues have offered helpful advice and comments as we have presented the various stages of the data collection at conferences over the years; we thank them all, but wish to point out that conversations with Ianthi Tsimpli, Roumyana Slabakova, Loes Koring, and Nina Hyams proved especially helpful at various stages. Any and all errors are inadvertent and completely our own.
AbstractWe report a longitudinal comprehension study of (long) passive constructions in two native-Spanish child groups differing by age of initial exposure to L2 English (young group: 3;0-4;0 years; older group: 6;0-7;0 years); where amount of input, L2 exposure environment, and socio-economic status are controlled. Data from a forced-choice task show that both groups comprehend active sentences, not passives, initially (after 3.6 years of exposure). One year later, both groups improve, but only the older group reaches ceiling on both actives and passives. Two years from initial testing, the younger group catches up. Input alone cannot explain why the younger group takes 5years to accomplish what the older group does in 4. We claim that some properties take longer to acquire at certain ages because language development is partially constrained by general cognitive and linguistic development (e.g. de
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