Language planners are increasingly aware of the importance of new speakers (individuals acquiring a language outside the home, typically later-on in life) for the revitalisation of minority languages. Yet, little is known about new speakers' activation (the process by which they become active and habitual minority language users). This article…

During face-to-face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face-to-face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily…

Infants are thought to be sensitive to frequency in the input as a cue for phonological development. However, linguistic biases such as phonological markedness have been argued to play a role too. Since frequency and markedness are correlated, the two assertions could be different interpretations of data that confound frequency and markedness. In…

The existence of sound-symbolism (or a non-arbitrary link between form and meaning) is well-attested. However, sound-symbolism has mostly been investigated with nonwords in forced choice tasks, neither of which are representative of natural language. This study uses ideophones, which are naturally occurring sound-symbolic words that depict sensory…

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term emigres of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited…

Background: Pragmatic assessment methods are very diverse and differ in informant type. Some rely on parents, others on teachers/professionals and some directly test pragmatic abilities in the children themselves. A widely used pragmatic parent questionnaire is the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2). However, it is not known how scores…

In this study, data and discourses on immigrant minority groups and languages other than Dutch at home and at school are presented in order to contextualise the status of Turkish and Moroccan communities and their languages in the Netherlands. Patterns of language use, choice and attitudes of Turkish (n = 63) and Moroccan (n = 64) youngsters in…

This study examines an interlanguage in which Moroccan learners of Dutch use non-thematic verbs in combination with thematic verbs that can be inflected as well. These non-thematic verbs are real dummy auxiliaries because they are deprived of semantic content and primarily have a syntactic function. Whereas in earlier second language (L2) research…

In a paired-associate learning (PAL) task, Dutch university students (n = 129) learned 20 English second language (L2) idioms either receptively or productively (i.e., L2-first language [L1] or L1-L2) and were tested in two directions (i.e., recognition or production) immediately after learning and 3 weeks later. Receptive and productive…

This study investigated the acquisition of word initial s clusters of 3-5 year old Dutch children with phonological disorders. Within these clusters, sl was produced correctly most often, whereas sn and sx were the more difficult clusters. In cluster reductions, s+obstruent and sl clusters reduction patterns followed the Sonority Sequencing…

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language-specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable- or word-final…