ABSTRACT: I would like to share with you the research that we have been carrying out on two topics that can open up new perspectives in the field of bilingualism/multilingualism in general and non-typical bilingualism in particular: (i) the testing of the psychological reality of a typological universal which establishes a close relationship between prosody and word order; and (ii) the use of an artificial language to investigate second language acquisition by non-typical populations.

In relation to the “Prosody of Coordination and Word Order Typological Universal” (Haspelmath, 2007; Stassen, 2000), and using experimental data, we have investigated the extent to which native speakers of SVO and SOV languages have clear-cut intuitions about the relationship between SVO and prosodic proclisis as in the English sentence Amaya ate apples —and–oranges versus the relationship between SOV and prosodic enclisis as in the corresponding Japanese sentence Amaya ringo–to —mikan-o tabeta. We also discuss Basque, an SOV language, where the relationship between SOV and enclisis does not hold, since Basque conjunctive coordination requires proclisis as in Amaya sagarrak —eta–laranjak jaten zituen. We finally discuss the implications of our findings for interlinguistic influence and code-switching preferences and constraints. 

Research on the acquisition and use of second or additional languages by populations with non-typical language development and, specifically, with genetic syndromes is scarce and, to the best of our knowledge, has not addressed the methodological challenges that teaching an artificial language may pose. We discuss here the methodological challenges that we have encountered when teaching the artificial language Japañol (Rivera et al. 2022) to Spanish monolinguals with Down Syndrome and with Prader-Willi Syndrome (Liceras & Romero, 2024). We pay specific attention to issues such as how implicit input is to be presented and/or manipulated as well as the level of abstraction that explicit input could involve.