Different linguistic classifications of Spanish and Slovak make the differences between these two languages. The genetic criterion classifies languages, clustering them into language families, the largest among which is the Indoeuropean one. The typological criterion divides languages according to their grammatical structures. Meanwhile, Slovak is…

This study examines the extent to which extra-linguistic factors such as language dominance, order of acquisition and language of instruction are deterministic for multilingual transfer selection and subsequent development. We test two groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals acquiring English as an L3 in a controlled setting. We first examine…

The city of Toulouse is a major contributor to the public visibility of Occitan, a regional language (RL) associated with southern France. Whilst French law recognizes the country's RLs in terms of national heritage, the official supremacy of French remains constitutionally unchallenged. This means that, along with other public texts, street names…

While the idea of a named language as a separate and discrete identity is a political and social construct, in the cases of Sardinian and Asturian doubts over their respective 'languageness' have real material consequences, particularly in relation to language policy decisions at the state level. The Asturian example highlights how its lack of…

Social networks have been investigated as an important factor to understand social and language innovations for decades. Most researchers focus on one-language-dominated societies when studying social networks' influence on language practice while studies on bilingual societies remain scarce. In this study, we examine how Chinese graduate students…

This study explores the effects of extensive audio-visual input with three captioning modes -- unenhanced captions, textually enhanced captions, and no captions -- on learning a variety of L2 grammatical constructions and examines the effects of three learnability factors: construction type, frequency, and recency. A total of 112 participants…

In the shift to English-medium instruction (EMI) in European higher education, policy often runs ahead of research and curricular decisions are taken independent of evidence regarding their suitability for achieving broader educational goals, which may range from internationalisation as a general strategy to English language learning as a more…

This study explores the source of transfer in third language (L3) English by two distinct groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals and late bilinguals. Our study addresses two research questions: (1) Does transfer come from the first language (L1), the second language (L2), or both? and (2) Does age of acquisition of the L2…

This study compared receptive English grammar skills of two groups of 7- and 9-year-old Danish children at the beginning of second language (L2) instruction in English, and two groups of Spanish/Catalan children of the same age after several years of instruction. The study examined the influence of two language-related factors (receptive…

The development of spelling skill is an intricate process for children with or at risk of Specific Learning Disabilities and requires targeted interventions. This problem exacerbates in the Greek orthographic system owning to its high complexity. The current study presents a novel spelling intervention program for Greek 3rd graders at risk of…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The…

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The theoretical complexity of current understandings of second language (L2) identity has brought the study of language learning motivations from basic concepts of intrinsic, integrative and instrumental motives to a more dynamic construct that interacts with background factors, learning contexts and proficiency levels. This cross-sectional study…