Despite the range of varieties of Han Chinese, Mandarin is the most widely studied variety in research on Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) around the world. To better understand the role of other varieties of Han Chinese in addition to Mandarin, this article presents a synthesis of research on the learning of Chinese varieties in formal and…

Research in first-language (L1) sentence processing has found evidence that language comprehenders use binding condition A as a filter to rule out noun phrases that are binding-inaccessible before proceeding with the task of finding the correct antecedent. Sturt (2013) notes that this strategy does not appear to apply to advanced speakers of…

A lot of attention has been devoted in the last 30 years to understanding nativeness and what has traditionally been called non-nativeness. While many studies have attempted to problematize the dichotomic division between so-called native speakers and non-native speakers, several others have specifically focussed on the language teaching…

This paper gives an account of the impact of spaces of linguistic non-understanding and spaces of linguistic partial understanding in the first author's linguistic ethnographic doctoral study of lawyer-client communication within UK immigration legal advice meetings. The paper uses the researching multilingually framework as a lens for exploring…

Research on Spanish heritage language (SHL) education has grown exponentially in the last two decades. The most recent nationwide study on SHL programs in US postsecondary institutions was conducted a decade ago. To continue this line of research, the primary aim of this study is to provide an update about the current state of SHL course offerings…

Little is known about how monolingual ideologies and their effects manifest in online contexts as compared to offline contexts. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse study to investigate this, with a focus on Twitter representations of Spanish as a heritage language in the USA. We analysed two corpora (one English and one Spanish--over 30…

In current research into second language (L2) speaking, aspects of fluency are measured as static constructs. Averaged over a complete speaking performance, for instance, syllables per minute is calculated. Similarly, the number of pauses is calculated per minute, averaged over a complete speaking task. This paper argues, however, that we need to…

This paper outlines the history of The International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education [IAIMTE] and the International Association for Research in L1 Education [ARLE]. Delegates at a 1993 conference at UEA recognised how important research was to generate evidence about the teaching and learning of all first languages, and…

Third language (L3) lexical acquisition is still underexplored. In this article I overview theoretical and empirical evidence on L3 lexical acquisition and the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in learning L3 words. I explain the mechanism of CLI as resulting from language co-activation in the multilingual learner's/user's mind.…

This meta-analysis synthesized 35 English studies (130 effect sizes, N = 1,981) that employed online tasks to investigate the processing of multiword sequences (MWSs). We examined (a) to what extent MWSs enjoy a processing advantage over novel word combinations; (b) how such a processing advantage is moderated by statistical regularities (i.e.,…

Migration, among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, is complex, dynamic, and multifaceted. At the heart of migration is language, the indispensable agent of migration. Hence, in this article, a new sub-discipline of linguistics is presented, and that is 'migration linguistics'. It is the interdisciplinary…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

The study of language maintenance and shift (LMS) has attracted a large body of empirical work in language policy and planning (LPP) contexts, including allochthonous (immigrant) and autochthonous (indigenous) languages. However, some critical ontological questions that relate to the scope and terminology of language maintenance studies remain…