This study addressed the language in professional communication and national identity of civil servants-bilinguals in the Ukrainian border oblasts with Russia. It was empirically determined that the civil servants mainly use the Ukrainian language in professional communication with the users of civil services, but with colleagues, the Russian…

The current narrative review focuses on cross-language influences (CLI) in spelling English as a foreign language (EFL). We identify three types of distance between first language (L1) and English that may impact English spelling, namely distance in writing system, in orthography and in phonology. The review describes and specifies the spelling…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

This mini-review attempts to provide a capsule overview of the role of genetic factors in reading and its development across languages and writing systems. The review is conceived and executed with a scoping review approach, synthesizing the methods employed in the existing research rather than producing a summary of evidence to answer a discrete…

Derivational suffixes are known to play a crucial role in assigning stress to multi-syllabic words among native English speakers. However, it is unclear whether second language (L2) learners of English can effectively use derivational suffixes as stress cues in written words. To address this gap, we studied if native Chinese-speaking adults…

Silent reading frequently entails engaging the "inner voice," a phenomenon in which individuals sub-vocally articulate words in their minds. This inner voice is understood to stem from the internalization process, wherein external verbal speech transitions into internal dialogue. However, the mechanisms through which foreign language…

This study compares the processing of three different types of written corrective feedback (WCF) by heritage language (HL), second language (L2), and third language (L3) learners who wrote and revised three short essays and received a different type of WCF for each essay (i.e., direct, coding, or underlining). Comparison of pre- and post-feedback…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

Detecting lies is crucial in numerous contexts, including situations in which individuals do not interact in their native language. Previous research suggests that individuals are perceived as less credible when they communicate in a nonnative compared with native language. The current study was the first to test this effect in truthful and…

The current study examined German spelling errors among students with German as their first language (L1) and those with German as their second language (L2) in Grades 3-4 (elementary school students; n = 127) and Grades 5-7 (secondary school students; n = 379). Five hundred and six students participated in the study. We performed two separate…

Learning new words is fundamental in both first and second-language reading. There are, however, divided opinions on the best instructional approaches. Two widely used approaches across languages are whole-word focus and word-constituent focus. The appropriateness of each approach has varied historically, even within a single language (e.g., the…

Mirror invariance or generalisation is the ability to recognise objects as being the same regardless of their spatial orientation. However, when, for example, learning to read Roman script, children need to hone these skills so that they can readily discriminate between mirror letters such as b/d or p/b. Korean Hangul makes a particularly…

This study aimed to examine the acquisition of Roman alphabetic script among young children within a bilingual (Arabic and English) educational environment employing a language separation pedagogical approach in Muscat, Oman. Data were collected utilizing participant observations, video recordings to capture the interactions of three children and…

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese-L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners' production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…