Speakers show cross-linguistic differences in expressing placement events involving support (cup on table) and containment (apple in bowl) in first language (L1) contexts. They rely on either more-general (e.g., Spanish for support, Polish for containment) or more-specific (e.g., German, Polish for support; Spanish, German for containment)…

In two visual priming experiments, we investigated the relation of form-identical word forms with different grammatical functions in L1 and L2 German. Four different grammatical types (inflected verbs, infinitives, deverbal conversion forms, and countable nouns) were used as primes and their influence on the processing of form-identical inflected…

This study is a comparative examination of reading behavior of first-language (L1) Canadian and second-language (L2) Finnish and German readers of English. We measured eye-movement patterns during reading the same set of English sentences and administered tests of English vocabulary, spelling, and exposure to print. The core of our study is a…

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and…

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to investigate whether a relationship between perception and production abilities regarding a challenging second-language (L2) phonological contrast is observable (a) when both modalities must rely on accessing stored lexical representations and (b) when there is an asymmetry in task focus between…

This longitudinal study explored the roles of item- and learner-related variables in L2 learners' development of productive collocation knowledge (L1 = Dutch; L2 = German; NLearners= 50). Learners' form recall knowledge of 35 target collocations was measured three times over a 3-year period. The item-related variables investigated were L1-L2…

This longitudinal study with time-serial data examines for the first time whether different types of intraindividual variation in second language (L2) performance and cognitive functioning are related, and how and when they influence L2 development longitudinally in older adulthood. We analyzed the L2 development of 26 German-speaking adults aged…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

Sleep plays a role in the consolidation of various aspects of language learning. In this study, we investigated the extent to which sleep-dependent memory consolidation contributes to second language (L2) rule generalization and enhancement of L2 explicit knowledge. One hundred native English speakers were engaged in a meaning-focused training of…

This study investigates whether repeating a prime sentence aloud strengthens short-term and longer-term priming of adverb-first word order among adult intermediate L1 English-German L2 learners (N = 30). Compared to an earlier study (Jackson & Ruf, 2017), in which similarly proficient L1 English-German L2 learners heard, but did not repeat,…

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that…

The speech of second language learners is often influenced by phonetic patterns of their first language. This can make them difficult to understand, but sometimes for listeners of the same first language to a lesser extent than for native listeners. The present study investigates listeners' awareness of the accent by asking whether accented speech…

Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., "V with n," illustrated by…

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the…

Investigating the impact of linguistic characteristics on visual word recognition in children, we studied whether differences in native (L1) and second language (L2) processing already emerge at the beginning of reading development. German elementary school students in grades 2 to 6 completed a battery of standardized tests and a lexical decision…