English marks the distinction between adjectives and adverbs with an adverbial suffix, whereas Dutch and German allow adjectives to be used adverbially without extra morphology. This may give rise to the idea that English, like Latin, is more specific in its classification of various types of modifiers. We propose an alternative analysis: Dutch and German draw a different dividing line, between attributive modifiers (NP-level) on the one hand, and predicative and adverbial modifiers (clause-level) on the other. To this end, they use adjectival inflection instead of derivational morphology. We describe how the adverbial systems in these three West-Germanic languages have developed and try to explain the changes that have occurred.

Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three laryngeal stop systems and examines the acquisition of the English and German systems by a group of native speakers of Dutch. The analysis reveals that both trained and untrained participants transferred prevoicing from Dutch into English and German but acquired aspiration and thus showed a “mixed” laryngeal system in both their L2 (English) and their L3 (German). Since even untrained participants produced voiceless stops in the target Voice Onset Time range, pronunciation training has only a moderate effect.*

Our study is concerned with reading processes. Using a letter-detection paradigm with masked priming, we tested for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects in Dutch and English. Whereas Dutch readers showed digraph effects with 67-ms primes, English readers showed only letter effects at 67 ms and merely a weak digraph trend at 83 ms. These findings are consistent with the PSYCHOLOGICAL GRAIN SIZE THEORY, a model of reading development that predicts that grapheme-phoneme conversion proceeds faster in shallow than in deep orthographies. This also demonstrates that similar language structures can be processed differently if they are modulated by different inter-faces, in this case, orthography.

This study compares speech production data of agrammatic aphasic speakers in Dutch, German, and English to examine the relative importance of different properties of determiners and pronouns (such as case, gender, definiteness) in these three languages. Agrammatic aphasic speakers omit determiners and use relatively few pronouns in their speech production. Ruigendijk (2007) compared Dutch and German-speaking agrammatic speakers’ performance and showed that the German group omitted more determiners. The current study adds data from English-speaking agrammatic aphasics to test the hypothesis that the more severe problems in German agrammatism were caused by case morphology, which is not present on Dutch and English determiners. The results show that English patterns with Dutch, and thus support the hypothesis that it is case morphology that makes the German determiners more problematic.

This paper is a corpus-based comparative study of modal particles in German and Dutch. We examine the special ability of Dutch and German modal particles to cluster, and demonstrate that Dutch is far more cluster-friendly than German. We also find clear differences in the behavior of cognate particles in the two languages and note that a corpus study reveals quite different patterns from those arrived at by introspection in earlier research. Finally, we suggest that in attempting to capture regularities about particle usage, it is useful to consider not just the linear ordering of particles within a cluster, but also typical non-contiguous pairings (for example, as “brackets” inside which other particles may occur). We also speculate briefly on the function of particle clusters.