*The authors would like to thank Paul Boersma, Stuart Davis and the audience of the 20thManchester Phonology Meeting for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We would also like to thank Mike Hammond for his guidance on various issues pertaining to English consonants, and the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions. Our deepest gratitude to all the staff and pupils at St. Margaret Clitherow, Carrington Primary, and Woodland House School for making this research possible. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 These results indicate that exposure to complex word initial clusters (in Polish) can accelerate the development of less phonologically complex clusters (in English).This constitutes significant new evidence that the facilitatory effects of bilingual acquisition extend to structural phonological domains. The implications that these results have on competing views of phonological organisation and phonological complexity are also discussed.

Purpose:Results of recent pilot studies suggest that the interpretation of pronominal elements in Down Syndrome (DS) may follow a pattern unattested in typical development, indicating the presence of a selective deficit targeting the comprehension of reflexive pronouns. These findings come at a time when there is a heated debate surrounding pronoun comprehension in typical development as well. We aim to contribute to these debates by examining pronoun comprehension in Greek, a language that exhibits unusual patterns in pronoun comprehension in typical development. Method: Seven Greek-speaking individuals with DS and a control group of fourteen typically developing (TD) children were tested. We examined the comprehension of pronominal elements, including strong pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and pronominal clitics, using a picture selection task. Results: The data reveal evidence of deviant pronoun comprehension in individuals with DS compared to the TD group. The DS group encountered problems in the interpretation of reflexive pronouns when compared to the TD group, while the performance of the two groups was comparable in all remaining conditions. Conclusions: Findings are in line with the selective deficit model of language comprehension in DS, supporting the presence of a cross-linguistic reflexive deficit.

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for their assistance with this project. We are also grateful to the editors and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Funding:This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council UK (ES/E024556/1).GT was supported the European Research Council (ERC-SG-209704), and the British Academy Results reveal that non-selective syntax in English sentence comprehension is limited to bilinguals with higher Welsh verbal fluency. This result suggests for the first time directionality in cross-language syntactic activation in early bilinguals.

In this paper, I study the production of consonant clusters by Greek children and examine the consequences of the acquisition data for phonological theory, with particular emphasis on the word-initial position. Using a non-word repetition test, I tested the order of acquisition of wordinitial and word-medial s+obstruent (sT), obstruent-obstruent (TT) and obstruent-sonorant (TR) clusters in 59 children. The results provide evidence against any analysis that assigns identical status to word-initial sT and word-initial TT, such as models of extrasyllabicity, and lend support to an alternative analysis of the beginning of the word, based on Lowenstamm's (1999) initial ON hypothesis and CVCV theory (Scheer 2004).