This study tested whether Punjabi-English bilinguals feel a stronger rapport with another bilingual stranger when communicating in L1 Punjabi or their dominant L2 English. Some previous studies have shown greater emotional reactions to a dominant language. We predicted that participants would feel more comfortable speaking their dominant language.…

Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

While morphology constitutes a crucial component of the human language system, the neural bases of morphological processing in the human brain remains to be elucidated. The current study aims at exploring the extent to which the second language (L2) morphological processing would resemble or differ from that of their first language (L1) in adult…

Research on language and cognitive processes in bilinguals over the past few decades has underscored the activation of words in the first language (L1) during comprehension and production of the second language (L2) (e.g., Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, &…

The simple view of reading (SVR) model proposes that reading comprehension is the product of cognitive domain skills, word decoding, and oral language (linguistic) comprehension, and that decoding and language comprehension make separate, independent contributions to reading comprehension. The SVR has been supported in both first (L1) and second…

Research on first language (L1) reading has long since established the link between the proficiency of the reader and their efficiency in oculomotor control. More proficient readers make longer saccades and land closer to the word's center, which is a word's optimal viewing position, and make fewer refixations. Eye-tracking studies of second…

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…

Access to quality early care and education is particularly important for dual language learners (DLLs), as these years represent an important window for exposure and initial development of both English and their home languages. This fact sheet presents information about children under the age of 6 growing up speaking a language other than English…

Perceived sense of belonging and positive social climate on campus are crucial elements for post-secondary students, as they contribute to academic achievement, positive mental health, and help-seeking. Few studies have explored post-secondary students' sense of belonging and perceptions of social climate in an official language minority campus,…

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study on multilingual speakers conducted in Germany. Data were collected using a questionnaire instrument launched in 2021. To our knowledge, this is the first enquiry into multilinguals' own perception of their spoken languages in Germany. The core research questions addressed in this paper are (1)…

This paper forwards the notion that languages are an important resource for sustainable development for modern societies. Informed by theories from both sociolinguistics and language economics on the value of language skills, it is suggested that language(s) have different kinds of value in multilingual societies. Sociolinguists often emphasize…

Recent developments in machine translation (MT) might have led some people to believe that soon professional translation will not be needed, but most translator trainers are aware of the high demand for the quality that MT systems cannot deliver without human intervention. It is thus important that professional translators, trainers and their…

I investigated the trajectory of processing variability, as measured by coefficient of variation (CV), using an intentional word learning experiment and reanalyzing published eye-tracking data of an incidental word learning study (Elgort et al., 2018). In the word learning experiment, native English speakers (N = 35) studied Swahili-English word…

French immersion (FI) programs in Canada have historically served predominantly Canadian-born, English-speaking students and families in their endeavour to learn both of the country's official languages, French and English. However, FI programs are becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse as a result of increased global…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…