The study examined the role of Chinese-Japanese cognate awareness in Japanese vocabulary acquisition among college Chinese learners of Japanese. Thirty-seven college-level students participated in this study and they completed a bilingual cognate awareness test which covered both crosslinguistic similarities and differences. In addition,…

Speech listeners focus on a speaker's face to acquire different information in social communication. Fixation on the mouth associates with language processing and attention to the eyes is mainly driven by social/emotional cues. Here, we investigated how selective attention to the eyes and mouth would vary with language-emotion interaction during…

Current research on the in-class discursive realities in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) classrooms has been mostly restricted to whole class scenarios, whereas student-student interactive discourse in task-based activities is largely ignored. This study explores peer interactions among university students in an EMI marketing course in…

A growing body of research has provided evidence for the foreign language effect on thinking, notably decision-making. Our prior work found reduction of recency effect following positive feedback in a foreign language as compared to the native tongue during even-probability gambling. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying this effect…

Despite much research on how multilingual learners view the linguistic properties of language, how they perceive languages as cultural capital has been far less investigated. Drawing on the theories of social cognition, this study explores how multiple foreign language learners' impressions, as a lens to observe their multilingual awareness, are…

Limited research to date has addressed the language socialisation of transnational children during global movement with their parents. The aim of this study was to explore the complexity of language socialisation for a transnational child experiencing a multilingual environment both at home and in preschool. This transnational English- and…

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the…

A new trend in the creation of multimodal products has been to include various ethnicities and languages to be more representative of current societies. The presence of more than one language can be problematic and challenging for translators, and consequently, various scholars have attempted to propose possible strategies for rendering such…

This study examined Americans' attitudes toward standard American English (SAE) and nine, non-Anglo foreign accents: Arabic, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Hispanic, Mandarin, Russian, and Vietnamese. Compared to SAE speakers, all foreign-accented speakers were rated as harder to understand, more likely to be categorised as foreign (rather than…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

Compared with reading, writing and listening, there has been a paucity of empirical data documenting learners' experiences of speaking English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) in different learning contexts in spite of the fact that developing the ability to speak in a second or foreign language is widely…

A comparison of the performance of age- and intelligence-matched bilingual (n=46) and monolingual (n=38) six- and seven-year olds on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities indicated that the bilinguals had significantly inferior performance in tests of the visual-motor channel, analogous auditory-vocal tests, and representative level. (18…

A study based on monthly recordings of one bilingual child exposed to English and German suggests that, contrary to earlier research, the acquisition of sociolinguistic rules appears to precede the acquisition of structural rules. The assumption that linguistic sophistication is necessary for children to understand that they are exposed to two…

The activation of arousal components for emotion-laden words in English (e.g. kiss, death) was examined in two groups of participants: English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, emotion-laden words were rated on valence and perceived arousal. These norms were used to construct prime-target word pairs that were used in…

Examines assumptions about second language acquisition by means of the anatomical model described in Part 1 of the study (see vol. 6, no. 2 of this journal). The analysis shows that the assumptions are rooted in the Direct Method and that they retard learning. Implications for second language instruction are noted. (SED)