This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish--English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

This study examined the significance of the mode of delivery--aural versus written--in second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and L2 comprehension skills. One of the unique aspects of listening comprehension that sets it apart from reading comprehension is the mode of delivery--language input is delivered not visually but aurally. Somewhat…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

This dissertation explores subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Palenquero Spanish (PL Spanish) and Palenquero Creole (PL Creole), two languages that have coexisted for centuries in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), share most of their lexicon, but differ in their grammar. Crucially, this study investigates how the contact between them and the…

Empirical evidence remains sparse about how videos enhanced with first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) subtitles influence cognitive load in L2 learners. To address this point, 25 Korean undergraduate students were exposed to six short videos: baseline, L1-subtitled, and L2-subtitled videos at both high and low difficulty levels (determined…

Background: Given the limited availability of effective tools for Korean language learning among students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is a need to explore innovative educational technologies to support the development of reading skills in Korean language education for this population. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to…

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German…

In this study, we examined the accuracy and consistency of Greek-speaking children with spelling difficulties using a spelling level-matched design at two time points. Eighty-seven children were selected for inclusion in three groups: a group with spelling difficulties (SpD, n = 22 fifth graders) and two control groups, a chronological age-matched…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

This study proposed an innovative automated approach to differentiation of the vocabulary proficiency of Chinese speakers. A robust K-means algorithm was designed to compare the oral proficiency between L1 and L2 Chinese speakers regarding lexical richness and how relatively effective the various lexical measures were in performing the…

Although extensive research has focused on the perceptual abilities of second language (L2) learners, a significant gap persists in understanding how cognitive functions like phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and nonverbal intelligence (IQ) impact L2 speech perception. This study sets out to investigate the discrimination of L2 English…