orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…

Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish-L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching…

Several studies have explored the use of iconic gestures to improve the learning of foreign vocabulary. In this quest, words for abstract concepts have been largely neglected, under the assumption that abstract concepts have poor or non-existent sensory-motor representations. Yet, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that they are grounded on…

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we…

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, oe/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This study explores the source of transfer in third language (L3) English by two distinct groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals and late bilinguals. Our study addresses two research questions: (1) Does transfer come from the first language (L1), the second language (L2), or both? and (2) Does age of acquisition of the L2…

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion…

This article reports on a study investigating the relative influence of the first language and dominant language (L1) on second language (L2) and third language (L3) morpho-lexical processing. A lexical decision task compared the responses to English NV-er compounds (e.g. "taxi driver") and non-compounds provided by a group of native…

A study was conducted to identify the scope and timing of maturational constraints in three linguistic domains within the same individuals, as well as the potential mediating roles of amount of second language (L2) exposure and language aptitude at different ages in different domains. Participants were 65 Chinese learners of Spanish and 12 native…

This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax-discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting Lopez's (2009) pragmatic features [[plus or minus]a(naphor)] and [[plus or minus]c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…