1. Early Verbs and Argument Structure in L2
445

2. Verbs & nouns in the bilingual mental lexicon
Schelletter, C. (2005) Bilingual Children's Lexical Development: Factors Affecting the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs and Their Translation Equivalents. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

3. Translation equivalents
Adult bilinguals - particular groups of words and their translation equivalents have a closer relationship and are translated faster as a result.
Kroll & Stewart (1994), Kroll & de Groot (1997) and van Hell & de Groot (1998) - there is an effect of form similarity. Nouns that are similar in sound and spelling are translated faster in both translation directions.
The conceptual feature model (Kroll & De Groot 1997) - form similar words have a feature overlap in their conceptual representations in the two languages.
Can the previous findings on form similar nouns be also be extended to verbs?
For verbs, form similarity should also result in a conceptual feature overlap between verbs and their translation equivalents, on the other hand, verbs have been found to be tied in more with grammar (Schelletter et al. 2001). This could affect the speed of translation of verbs, as well as the acquisition of early verbs.

4. A case study German/English bilingual girl
Age of 1;11 to 2;8 in German and 2;2 to 2;9 in English.
Three sub-periods: period 1 from 1;11 to 2;3, period 2 from 2;4 to 2;6 and period 3 from 2;7 to 2;9.

5. Figure 1 shows that nouns classed as identical occur as frequently as the other noun types in the first observation period, although there are few tokens. This changes for the German context for the remainder of the observation period where nouns that are not similar become the most frequent noun type. In the English context, identical and form-similar nouns are more frequent than not similar nouns in the second observation period but the picture becomes more similar to the German context for the last observation period.
Figure 2 shows that the distribution of identical, form similar and not similar verbs remains similar during the observation period and for both language contexts. The high proportion of identical verbs was only due to the frequent occurrence of the be verb in both language contexts.

6. Pathbreaking verbs in the bilingual lexicon
Serratrice, L. (2001) The emergence of verbal morphology and the lead-lag pattern issue in bilingual acquisition. In Cenoz & Genesee (eds.) Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, 43-70
English-Italian simultaneous bilingual (one parent one language), ages 1;10 - 3;2 twice a month.
82 verb types
17 with multiple inflections (>3 forms)
Most of these verbs are pathbreaking verbs (Ninio) - frequent, transitive, generic (general purpose), semantically light and pragmatically important

7. Subject omission 6 Inuktitut-English bilingual children
Allen, S. (2006) Language acquisition in inuktitut-english bilinguals. Paper presented at the Conference on Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a Multilingual Society, Boston University
6 Inuktitut-English bilingual children
aged 1;8 to 2;11 at onset, taped for one year
5 children have two bilingual Inuit parents
1 child has English-speaking father and bilingual mother
naturalistic data collected via videotape
(Allen, Genesee, Fish & Crago 2002)

8. Contrastive analysis English
overt subjects usually required (e.g. John ate the cake.)
subject omission allowed in imperatives and certain colloquial instances (e.g. ____ Eat the cake!)
Inuktitut
overt subjects only required for emphasis or disambiguation
subject omission allowed in all other instances
(Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)

9. Predictions If no crosslinguistic influence
subject omission rates similar to monolinguals in both languages
If crosslinguistic influence
subject omission rates different from monolinguals in one or both languages
(Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)

10. English
(Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)
Inuktitut

11. Object omission
Yip, V. and S. Matthews (2005) Dual Input and Learnability: Null Objects in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, Somerville,MA: Cascadilla Press.
Simultaneously bilinguals , Cantonese/English, Longitudinal recordings, ages 1;6 - 3;6.

12. Null objects in ML
Roeper (1981, 140) “All subcategorizations are obligatory until positive evidence shows that they are optional”.
Ingham (1993:109) - Naomi 1;08-1;11, 4.8% (12/251 tokens).
Huang (1999) - Adam 2;05–2;09, 3.5%

13. Quantitatively, the percentage of null objects in Timmy’s first eight recording sessions (2;04-2;08) ranges from 9.1%-28.6%, a higher range than has been reported in any monolingual studies. In the subsequent period from 2;09-3;06, the rate drops but remains consistently above 5%. In the parallel development of Timmy's Cantonese in the same period (2;04-2;8), the rate of null objects ranges from 12.3%-35.3% and is consistently above 10% throughout the whole period, remaining between 22.9%-35.8% toward the end of the recording (3;04-3;06).
(14) INV: Where shall we stick it? (Timmy 2;05;05)
CHI: Put here.
(15) I put in the where? (Sophie 2;05;25)

14. Why? An analysis of null objects
Mueller (1998:153) - Input ambiguity: transfer may occur when “two different grammatical hypotheses are compatible with the same surface string.”
(a) the target analysis applicable to adult English, in which the missing object is not syntactically present, but interpreted semantically as generic:
eat β
[+generic]
(b) the analysis based on Chinese grammar (see examples 22-25), in which the missing object is syntactically present, coreferential with a null topic and therefore interpreted as specific:
[TOPIC ]i eat x i
[+specific]

15. Is there transfer of argument structure? Syntactic Priming
Salamoura, A. & J. Williams (2007) Processing verb argument structure across languages: Evidence for shared representations in the bilingual lexicon. Applied Psycholinguistics 28, 627–660
Adult L2 learners, native Greek-speaking advanced learners of English
The prime fragment was always in Greek (L1) and the target fragment always in English (L2).

16. Background
Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) - “Syntactic information associated with words is represented at the lemma level”.
Syntactic priming - the tendency to reproduce the same syntactic structure in a different semantic context.
Bock (1986) - participants who listened and repeated a prime sentence with a particular form, were more likely to describe a target picture with the same rather than a semantically alternative form
for example, a prepositional object (PO) sentence such as The rock star sold some cocaine to an undercover agent,
for example, double object (DO) sentence such as The girl is handing the boy the paintbrush.”

17. Will syntactic priming occur from L1 to L2?
The language-shared hypothesis - equivalent L1 and L2 syntactic structures share representations in the bilingual mental lexicon.
The language-specific hypothesis - even equivalent L1 and L2 syntactic structures do not have shared representations.
The language-shared hypothesis predicts cross-language syntactic priming.
What is the nature of syntactic representations in the bilingual lexicon: information about syntactic structure in general, about constituent order, order of thematic roles, or a combination of these?

18. Findings
All three experiments exhibited cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming using an oral sentence completion task.
Experiment 1 obtained cross-language syntactic priming when there was an overlap of syntactic structure and order of thematic roles between prime and target. It also showed that the magnitude of priming did not differ when the L1 prime and L2 target verbs were translation equivalents or when they differed.
Experiment 2 showed that cross-language syntactic priming is balanced in that both PO and DO structures can be primed across languages compared to a baseline (intransitive) structure. It also demonstrated that constituent order variants of the same structure did not prime each other.
Experiment 3 in conjunction with those of Experiment 2 showed that cross-language syntactic priming is contingent upon the overlap of syntactic structure and thematic roles between the first postverbal arguments of prime and target items independently of the overall syntactic structure and thematic roles of the entire sentence.
All three experiments exhibited cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming using an oral sentence completion task. They also investigated the conditions under which this effect takes place. Experiment 1 obtained cross-language syntactic priming when there was an overlap of syntactic structure and order of thematic roles between prime and target. It also showed that the magnitude of priming did not differ when the L1 prime and L2 target verbs were translation equivalents or when they differed, suggesting that priming did not exploit the translational links between L1 and L2 verb lemmas when there is a prime-target delay. Experiment 2 showed that cross-language syntactic priming, like within-language priming, is balanced in that both PO and DO structures can be primed across languages compared to a baseline (intransitive) structure. It also demonstrated that constituent order variants of the same structure did not prime each other. Only the L1 PO structure primed the L2 PO relative to a baseline. The L1 shifted-PO structure behaved similarly to the baseline (intransitive) structure, indicating that constituent order is a factor influencing structural repetition across languages and consequently L2 sentence production. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 in conjunction with those of Experiment 2 showed that cross-language syntactic priming is contingent upon the overlap of syntactic structure and thematic roles between the first postverbal arguments of prime and target items independently of the overall syntactic structure and thematic roles of the entire sentence. More importantly, in all these experiments one intervening filler item was introduced between primes and targets to preclude lexical and discourse influences between them.

19. Is there transfer of argument structure? Grammaticality Judgment
Montrul, S. (2001) First-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs. Second Language Research 17,2 pp. 144–194
Adult L2 learners.
English, Spanish and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English, Spanish, Turkish and Japanese
The acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., English frighten)

20. Hypothesis & Predictions
Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994; 1996) - the initial state of L2 acquisition is the full computational system of the L1 grammar, including all the abstract features but excluding the morphophonological matrices of lexical and functional items.
If the formal features of a given morpheme are expressed overtly in the L1 but non-overtly in the L2, L2 learners will have difficulty with zero-morphemes and will try to find a surrogate L2-specific phonological form on which to map the formal features of such a lexical item
If a morpheme has no phonological form in the L1 but it does in the L2, L2 learners are likely to assume that such morpheme does not have an overt form in the L2 either, at least initially.

22. * * * * * L1

24. * * * L1 L1 L1

25. Summary
Translation equivalent are link in adults L2 and in bilingual children (longer for verbs than for nouns)
Adult L2 - full transfer of argument structure
Simultaneous bilinguals - subject omission is restricted by language, but there is interference of object omission