The Competition Model has served as a functional explanation of cross-linguistic influence and transfer for more than 30 years. A large number of studies have used the Competition Model to frame investigations of sentence processing strategies in different types of bilingual and multilingual speakers. Among the different bilingual speakers…

Although translation may be considered the "sine qua non" of bilingual legislation, the perceived authenticity and equivalence of different language versions of the same law are contingent on the disavowal of translation. Yet precisely because of such disavowal, translated versions of law are paradoxically valorized as equal in meaning…

For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…

After 18 months of research and many practice sessions, Sponge opened in the fall of 2005. This year, Sponge will provide language classes for over 350 children from newborn to seven years in the Seattle area. This language program offers Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese--all taught by native speakers. While the staff sets out to create a…

Seeing language as a complex, dynamic system and language use/acquisition as dynamic adaptedness ("a make-do" solution) to a specific context proves a useful way of understanding change in progress, such as that which occurs with a developing L2 system. This emergentist shift of perspective provides another way of understanding previously observed…

This paper describes four writing systems and discusses research on phonetic coding, eye movements, and cortical processing in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. Research on word recognition in English, Japanese Kanji and Kana, and Korean Hangul are presented. (Author/MT)

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. Data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of…

Trends and developments in computer applications in Chinese language research are described, focusing on these areas: input of Chinese characters and Chinese corpus; automatic segmentation of Chinese written text in corpus; development of a grammar knowledge base for Chinese words to be used as a resource for text segmentation and corpus…

Considers the validity of applying common assessment instruments and scales to assess the language skills of Australian school-age language learners from different first-language backgrounds. Findings reveal a strong relationship between home exposure to the language and the level of performance on the listening and reading components of the…