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This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.

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This study contributes to the characterization of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI) by investigating whether deficits in the production and comprehension of pronouns in Greek children with SLI are best accounted for by domain-general or domain-specific models of the language faculty. The Greek pronominal system distinguishes between acoustically salient and non-salient forms, which are both interpreted on semantic/thematic grounds, and non-salient forms (object clitics) interpreted on syntactic grounds either in spec-head agreement or syntactic dependencies incurring feature checking through movement/chain formation. The results revealed a significant effect of the syntactic configuration on the production and comprehension of object clitics. Children with SLI were significantly impaired in the production and comprehension of those clitics that enter into operations necessitated by complex syntactic dependencies involving feature checking through movement/chain formation. Thus, the data support the computational grammatical complexity hypothesis and indicate that the deficits associated with object clitics in Greek-speaking children with SLI result from domain-specific impairment with syntactic dependencies incurring feature checking at the clause level involving movement/chain formation.

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We investigated working memory and verbal fluency in simultaneous interpreters, expecting to find enhanced working memory and semantic processing in interpreters relative to others fluent in a second language. The interpreters (n = 15) outperformed the control group (n = 35) on semantic fluency and most measures of working memory; their advantage over teachers of a foreign language (n = 15) approached, but did not reach, statistical significance. Our findings suggest that, while proficiency in a foreign language may enhance fluency and working memory skills, simultaneous interpreters have semantic processing and working memory capacities greater than those expected from mere proficiency in a foreign language.