Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is…

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments.…

Multimodal approaches have been shown to be effective for many learning tasks. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of five multimodal methods for second language (L2) Mandarin tone perception training: three single-cue methods (number, pitch contour, color) and two dual-cue methods (color and number, color and pitch contour). A total of…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

Research on second language lexical development during reading has found positive effects for word frequency, the provision of glosses, and elaborative word processing. However, findings have been inconclusive regarding the effect of such intervention tasks on long-term retention. Likewise, few studies have looked at the cumulative effect of…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

The research reported here tests the claim made in the Input Processing approach to second language (L2) acquisition that interpreting the meaning of language form is essential for learning. This claim has been put forward as an underlying part of the pedagogical package known as Processing Instruction (PI) (VanPatten, 1996, 2002a, 2004). Two…