This article reports on the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. A distinctive feature of Tagalog is a unique system of voice that creates competing patterns, each with different possibilities for relativization. This study of children's performance on agent and patient relative clauses in…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

This investigation aimed to provide insights into the controversial debate on the role that age at onset of bilingualism plays in human language capacity with a focus on what it entails for first language (L1) attrition. L1 performance of Turkish immigrants (n = 57) in the United Kingdom with age at onset ranging between 7 and 34 years was…

Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10-15 years old, n = 22), as well as…

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR…

Although Kreyol is the language spoken and understood by the majority of Haitians, French is the language used as the medium for instruction. The use of a foreign language as a means for students to acquire literacy is a practice that has led to an ineffective educational system in Haiti. The aim of the quasi-experimental research study is to…

Although Kreyol is the language spoken and understood by the majority of Haitians, French is the language used as the medium for instruction. The use of a foreign language as a means for students to acquire literacy is a practice that has led to an ineffective educational system in Haiti. The aim of the quasi-experimental research study is to…

Past studies have shown that multimodal presentation of story can improve story-retelling performance in the first language. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether similar multimedia effects can be observed in second language learning and graphic novel reading. A total of 51 Chinese elementary school children, aged 7-8, who…

Questions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egré (2015), among others, questions embedded under know are ambiguous between "weakly exhaustive" (WE), "intermediate exhaustive" (IE), and "strongly exhaustive" (SE) interpretations (for…

This article explores the acquisition of Japanese vowel and consonant quantity contrasts by Cantonese learners. Our goal is to examine whether transfer from first language (L1) is possible when L1 experience is phonemic but restricted to a small set of sounds (short vs. long vowels) and when the experience is non-phonemic, derived only at morpheme…

Numerous studies have shown processing advantages for collocations, but they only investigated processing of adjacent collocations (e.g., "provide information"). However, in naturally occurring language, nonadjacent collocations ("provide" some of the "information") are equally, if not more frequent. This raises the…

The current study examined the effects of first language (L1) textual and audio glosses along with the moderating effect of learners' visual and auditory perceptual style on second language (L2) vocabulary learning. The participants were first divided into two groups of auditory and visual learners based on their scores obtained from a learning…

Teaching technical vocabulary in ESP context is a vital part of English language teaching at a university level. EFL teachers almost use traditional techniques for teaching new medical vocabulary. This study aimed at examining the impact of teaching medical vocabulary through collocations on vocabulary learning of medical students. This…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes are mushrooming in many different contexts. However, research has mainly focused on their impact on foreign language learning and to a lesser extent on L1 development, whereas the number of studies undertaken in multilingual contexts in which more than two languages coexist is negligible.…

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of post-reading group discussions in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages on L2 reading comprehension. The participants were fifteen Japanese university students of intermediate-level English. Three cohorts read four English texts and produced individual written recalls. Group 1 (the control…