This study contributes to the understanding of attitudes towards monolingual and code-switched varieties by examining the perceptions of 95 bilinguals towards Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching in Manitoba, a Canadian province where French is a minority language with official federal status. By means of a matched-guise test, we…

In a recent study, English-speaking L2 learners of German who received explicit instruction made significantly greater improvements in pronunciation and vocabulary than learners who received implicit instruction. Against the backdrop of this work, the present study reports learner preferences and perceptions about implicit and explicit language…

Non-tone language infants' native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants' preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone…

This paper examines the unintended consequences of state language policy and planning (LPP) that adopt subtractive approaches on teachers' subsequent receptivity to policy fine-tuning. A comparative approach is adopted in this statistical study of two strategic contexts, where the influence of the world's two leading languages--English and…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

The present study aims to investigate the role of L1 transfer effects on L2 sentence processing strategies during the interpretation of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. The main body of the study is divided into two sections. The first section describes Experiment 1, which is designed to test the resolution of RC attachment ambiguities…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

The present interdisciplinary research investigates the differential emotional expression between Persian monolinguals and Persian-English bilinguals. In other words, the article was an attempt to answer the questions whether bilinguals and monolinguals differ in the expression of positive and negative emotions elicited through sad and happy…