Variational Learning in Child L2 Acquisition? Comprehension of Verbal Agreement in Spanish and English

Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement

“…Given the difficulty in generating equivalently appealing visual stimuli to represent different meanings, a measure like the sensitivity computation serves to minimize the potential of a preference for one of the stimulus types and to focus the analysis on genuine comprehension ability. Indeed, in contrast to the results of our accuracy analyses that suggested greater success on plural than on singular trials, sensitivity scores showed that participants were more sensitive to the singular cue than to the plural one – somewhat surprisingly given that it is the plural that is overtly marked (see, e.g., Morales Reyes & Montrul, 2020, on L1 and L2 Spanish comprehension in older children, where accuracy was higher on plural than on singular items).…”