In order to translate and be translated, low-diffusion languages often use strategies that differ from those used by widely spoken languages and therefore create particular challenges for translators. One such strategy is indirect translation (including also relay interpreting). Since there are conflicting opinions about this practice within the…

The study focuses on literary translation between languages of low diffusion (LLD) from the perspective of a culture using such a language. The position of a language group in the world translation system determines the general flow of literary translation, but the specifics for the translation of an individual LLD may depend on a number of…

We present enetCollect, a large European network project funded as a COST Action that sets ground for combining crowdsourcing with IT technologies used in areas such as language learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project tackles a major challenge of bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to foster language learning of…

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that…

Examines the role of a "local cue"--the grammatical aspect expressed by the verb "ru/-ta"--in Japanese temporal clauses. Ninety-six children were examined. Results show that the success of verb forms as clues requires that temporal relations be clearly expressed. This supports the claim that overt surface clues facilitate…

A case study of a Russian-Hebrew bilingual woman with transcortical sensory aphasia showed that overall, aphasic symptoms were similar in the two languages, with Hebrew somewhat more impaired. The woman revealed a difference in her ability to perceive phonemes in the context of Hebrew words that depended on whether they were presented in a Russian…

Two experiments investigated the processing and representation of Dutch compound words as a function of their semantic transparency. The results provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. (50 references) (MDM)

Discusses development of a battery of tasks that were used to assess phonological processing skills in Panjabi-English bilingual children in West Birmingham, United Kingdom. Results support the notion that at least some tasks of phonological awareness may be language specific. (Author/VWL)

Visual recognition of inflected, derived, and morphophonemic Swedish nouns in monolingual Swedish and bilingual Swedish-Finnish speakers was investigated. Bilinguals were slower overall; inflected items yielded disproportionately longer reaction times in the bilingual group. Derived forms elicited fastest reaction times in both groups. The…

Comments are offered on an earlier paper on theory construction in second-language acquisition. A critical perspective is offered that is characterized by the ethical foundations of theory construction (and scientific activity in general) and the grounding of theory in practical activity. (60 references) (Author/LB)

Effects of case inflections, gender agreement, noun animacy, and word position on decisions and reaction times were explored for agent-object assignments in Croatian, a case-marking language. Results support the view that there may be constraints on the particular combinations of cues that may converge to facilitate, or compete to inhibit,…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether a parser's on-line processes are affected by manipulation of case markings in Korean sentence processing, and to evaluate the usefulness of a Ranked Flagged Serial Parser model in predicting Korean ambiguity resolution processes. (Author/VWL)

Findings are reported from a series of literacy assessments in which four classes of bilingual Grade 3 and Grade 5 students from an indigenous community in Central Mexico participated. Subjects who completed the battery of tests of reading and writing in Spanish and Nahuatl range from balanced bilinguals to Spanish-dominant speakers with at least…

An in-progress interdisciplinary research effort, Conversation Analytic (CA) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study, is reported. A conversation analytic approach to repair and self-explication is taken that covers both human studies and artificial intelligence. The term "human" is used here in place of "linguistic." Three…