The present study investigates bilinguals' capacity to rapidly establish memory traces for novel word forms in a second language (L2), as a function of L2 linguistic proficiency. A group of Chinese-English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were presented with a reading-aloud task, consisting of 16 pseudowords and 16 English words…

Recent studies have suggested that language aptitude is a domain-general and flexible trait to acquire foreign languages, regarding various cognitive abilities such as memory systems as its crucial components. Despite a growing interest in working memory, however, much remains unknown about the impact of associative memory on language aptitude.…

This study investigates whether audiovisual phonetic training with hand gestures encoding visible or nonvisible articulation features has a differential impact on learning second language sounds. Ninety-nine Catalan-Spanish bilingual students were trained to differentiate English /ae/ and /[lambda]/, which differ in the visible lip aperture and…

The requirement for Chinese students to adopt an English name for the English language classroom remains a relic of a previous era, which is not only accepted but also desirable by some. This study reports on 357 Chinese English language students' relationship with their English names in terms of the concepts of identity, agency and investment,…

Names serve as a rudimentary bond that connects us to the world. The relationship between language learners' foreign names adoption and their identity construction has been receiving increased attention. With most studies conducted in English-learning contexts, this study contributes to this line of research by adopting a multilingual framework to…

The present study tested whether the switch costs of production-based language switching tasks by trilinguals are due to competition from outside language schemas or from within language systems. We recruited 90 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals in 10th grade in a Tibetan middle school in China to name digits and number words using different…

This paper explores how textbooks for second language learners make ideologically motivated decisions regarding which forms of the target language are included in the curriculum. We explore this question via an analysis of Korean language textbooks, at a time when Korean society is becoming increasingly globalized and multicultural. The focus is…

The age at which people acquire a word influences word recognition, known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. In the first language (L1), AoA effects are widely found in various languages and experimental tasks. Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis proposes that AoA effects reflect the loss of network plasticity during the learning of mappings between…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…