This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal…

In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

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.…

In recent years, Third Language Acquisition (TLA) in Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) research has been debated regarding background languages' impact on learning a target language. While Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research often emphasizes the primary influence of the first language (L1) on the target language, it does not discount the…

The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental sequence. This article underscores the importance of a robust epistemological foundation, advocating for…

Most second language writing studies have approached the L2 Writing phenomenon through the cognitive theoretical lens that situates writing as a mental activity that resembles psychological and mathematical problem-solving (Cumming, 2016, p. 69). "While research on second language writing has expanded exponentially in recent years, it has for…

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) over the past decade have largely been driven by the scale of data and computation used to train large neural network-based models. However, these techniques are inapplicable to the vast majority of the world's languages, which lack the vast digitized text datasets available for English and a few other…

Extensive evidence indicates that early vocabulary skills predict later reading development among monolingually developing children. Some evidence suggests that a relationship between vocabulary and later reading also holds across languages among children whose home language differs from the school language. However, these findings have been mixed…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…

While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…

There has been increasing L3 research on L3 transfer selectivity, especially concerning which factor triggers crosslinguistic influence during L3 acquisition. According to Slabakova's (2016) Scalpel Model, every linguistic property has distinct and unique input factors regarding L3 acquisition such as high/low frequency or positive/negative input.…

Purpose: This study investigated the longitudinal, cross-linguistic developmental relationships of phonological awareness (PA), letter identification (letter ID), and morphological awareness (MA) in 71 heritage Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten and second grade. Method: Multiple linear regression was used to test if…

Using Self Study in Teach Education (S-STEP), this research examined the ways in which my utilization of Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a pedagogical tool contributed to developing teacher candidates as future educators. In doing so, this study aims to highlight the use of LL as an effective pedagogical tool for developing Critical Multilingual…

Among the various challenges that adult and other late language learners face on their journey to achieving nativelike proficiency, chunking has been identified as one of the most difficult tasks to master. Language users are able to derive and utilize chunks during language processing -- both in the first (L1) and the second language (L2) -- yet…

The impact of attitudes on the learning process and on the academic results achieved by students has been the object of numerous studies, which have shown a connection between attitudes and learning. Similarly, the impact of students' attitudes towards learning a foreign language (mainly English) has been explored from a wide range of…