The present study examined the production of inalienable possession with body parts in Spanish among 20 school-age children of Mexican-born parents born and raised in the United States. The results were compared to those of 20 first-generation immigrant parents (main input providers), 27 Spanish-dominant children of similar age, and 12 Spanish…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

The current study investigated how the processing of triple cognates (words sharing form and meaning across three languages) is modulated by the semantic bias of sentence context in a reading task. In the study, Polish-German-English trilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were monitored. The sentences were either semantically…

This text comments on the Keynote article 'Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition' by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related…

In the current study we used the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to directly compare the second language (L2) English perceptual span of two groups that speak languages with essentially the same lexicon and grammar but crucially with different writing directions (and scripts): Hindi (read left to right) and Urdu (read right to left). This…

Previous studies on bilingual children have shown a significant correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and a unique contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading performance in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence. However, few studies have compared…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

The present investigation examines intra-speaker variability in heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish by focusing on the potential effects of two variables in their acquisition of mood: lexical frequency and morphological regularity. To do so, this study tested participants' interpretation and use of early-acquired mood alternations conveying either…

A large amount of literature exists on how native speakers derive and process pragmatic inferences, yet few studies have examined the issue in second language learners, despite a controversial debate of second language (L2) ultimate attainment of phenomena situated at external interfaces. This study contributes to the debate on the integration of…

This article explores how multiple linguistic cues interact in predictive processing among second language (L2) learners. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether learners of German use case and prosody cues together to assign thematic roles and predict post-verbal arguments. During the experiment, participants listened…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

To isolate cross-lingual phonological effects during visual-word recognition, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals who are native speakers of Spoken Arabic (SA) and proficient readers of both Literary Arabic (LA) and Hebrew, were asked to perform a visual lexical-decision task (LDT) in either LA (Experiment 1) or Hebrew (Experiments 2 and 3). The critical…