This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

Mikhail Bakhtin is a latecomer to the field of child development. His contributions emphasize the dialogic nature of language as a lived event of becoming for all and de-thrones any monologic truths that might be told otherwise. Dismantling any master theory that might determine the ways children are known (or know-able), Bakhtin offers a…

This paper offers a comprehensive survey of translation ethics within the theoretical frame of Lady Welby's meaning triad concerning the relationship between ethics and translation in the meaning process of sign activities. The paper mainly discusses such aspects as: (1) the relationship between meaning triad and translation ethics, (2) upward…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge's dismissal of generative models such as…

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript…

This paper makes a strong connection between the need for innovation in second language pedagogy and the need for language teachers to develop a good understanding of how language develops in our minds/brains. The future for innovative language pedagogy requires that language teachers fully develop the following: (i) a working definition of the…

The present article aims to spur interest in the pedagogical potential of translating musicalized texts, a genre that for a long time has remained on the periphery of Applied Translation Studies. First, it provides a broad overview of the various theoretical perspectives that the academic community has had throughout history on the translation of…

This paper sets out to bridge the gap between theory and practice by suggesting activities and resources that could be used in the audiovisual translation (AVT) classroom when training students to achieve credible and natural-sounding dialogue in dubbing. Following a competence- and task-based approach, these activities have been implemented by…

This article proposes an integrated cognitive theory of reading and listening that draws on a maximalist account of comprehension and emphasizes the role of bottom-up and top-down processing. The theoretical framework draws on the findings of previous research and integrates them into a coherent and plausible narrative to explain and predict the…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

This article suggests three teaching ideas to help L2 learners improve speaking performances through form-focused instruction using formulaic language. Formulaic language is considered an effective way to foster speaking fluency because prefabricated chunks are faster to retrieve than constructing sentences word by word (Wray, 2002). In spite of…

At the preschool level in Malaysia, all preschools, including those from public and private sectors are required to follow the guidelines stated in the National Preschool Standard-based Curriculum (NPSC) issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 2017. However, the NPSC is very general and schools are not provided with any further guidance on…