Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1-L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2…

Learning a language is one typical and common cognitive phenomenon among human beings. What matters even most, is the additional language learning and advantages it may confer; an issue which cannot be simply overlooked in cognitive studies. The developmental effect of learning an additional language on memory is something that is confirmed in…

Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

Given the accumulating evidence about audiovisual input as a valuable resource from which knowledge of multiword expressions (MWEs) can be built up incidentally, the next inquiry arises as to what can be done to promote MWE uptake from this resource. Despite the increasing popularity of bilingual subtitles as a form of on-screen text, their…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

As an alternative to conventional instruction and evaluation methods, dynamic assessment aims to promote language learning by utilising an interactive approach. As a subset of dynamic assessment, the interventionist approach to dynamic assessment focuses on mediation from implicit to explicit. In spite of its central role in language learning and…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

We evaluated external and internal sources of variation in second language (L2) and native language (L1) proficiency among college students. One hundred and twelve native-English L2 learners completed measures of L1 and L2 speaking proficiency, working memory, and cognitive control and provided self-ratings of language exposure and use. When…

While the relationship between language experience and foreign language aptitude (FLA) has been studied extensively, little is known about the underlying intermediate link between them. This study investigates whether multilingual learning experience is correlated with FLA and whether working memory (WM) mediates this relationship. A total of 93…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

Recent studies highlight the important contribution of phonological working memory (PM) in the early stages of both native and foreign language development. However, research on the effects of PM training on language development is very limited. This study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of a PM training educational intervention as a means of…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…