Previous findings indicate that the way words are organized in the mental lexicon may differ in Arabic and English. While words are organized according to both orthographic and morphological form similarity in English, they are organized primarily according to morphological form similarity in Semitic languages (Frost et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn…

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language…

Language learners' actual speech performances constitute an essential aspect of studies on second language learning and teaching. Although there is ample research on fluency and pauses in English, current literature does not touch on this issue from a multilingual perspective by comparing both read and spontaneous speech performances. In this…

The current study examines the influence of word type (i.e., emotion-label vs. emotion-laden) and valence (i.e., positive vs. negative vs. neutral) on the processing of emotion words among bilinguals. To this end, three groups of Arabic--English bilinguals (n = 120 per group) completed the tasks of free recall, ratings for concreteness,…

Based on Mahboob and Elyas (World Engl 33(1):128-142, 2014), who identified an expanding circle variety of Englishes, known as 'Saudi English', the present paper addresses the consonantal variations between Formal English and a sub-variety of Saudi English, termed as 'Saudi Hijazi English'. The paper presents the specific consonants of Saudi…

This study explores how vocabulary learning strategy usage and skills in the four language domains relate to participants' increase in vocabulary size and to the learning of specific vocabulary items over a certain period of time. Sixty-one advanced L1 Arabic L2 learners of English read target words in semi-authentic reading materials and were…

Previous research suggests that late bilinguals who speak typologically distant languages are the least likely to show evidence of non-selective lexical access processes. This study puts this claim to test by using the gating task to determine whether words beginning with speech sounds that are phonetically similar in Arabic and English (e.g.,…

This study examined two possible sources of asymmetrical lexical access: phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category and orthographic information. Three groups of native Korean speakers learned Arabic non-words with sound pairs with/without an L1-dominant category (/l-r/ vs. /?-h/), and then their phonetic categorization and lexical encoding…

L2 reading research suggests that L1 orthographic experience influences L2 word recognition. Nevertheless, the findings on multi-syllabic words in English are still limited despite the fact that a vast majority of words are multi-syllabic. The study investigated whether L1 orthography influences the recognition of multi-syllabic words, focusing on…

The aim of the study was to elucidate whether and how reliance on a second language impacts the learning of new information under very basic learning conditions. The paradigm used to investigate this issue required individuals to learn a series of associations between numerals and particular letter strings. Participants were two groups of…

The goal of the present study was to examine functioning of late bilinguals in their second language. Specifically, we asked how native and non-native Hebrew speaking listeners perceive accented and native-accented Hebrew speech. To achieve this goal we used the gating paradigm to explore the ability of healthy late fluent bilinguals (Russian and…