This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

Learning a language is one typical and common cognitive phenomenon among human beings. What matters even most, is the additional language learning and advantages it may confer; an issue which cannot be simply overlooked in cognitive studies. The developmental effect of learning an additional language on memory is something that is confirmed in…

In simultaneous interpreting studies, the concept of interference -- namely, the marks of the source language in the target language -- is perceived as a negative phenomenon. However, interference is likely to happen at a lexical level when the target language does not have its own lexicon. This is the case in international sign (IS), which can be…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

This conceptual research analyses the historical development of the German concept of "Bildung" to the Danish "dannelse." The starting point is J.G. Fichte's 1808 "Addresses to the German Nation," in which "Bildung" is analyzed as a key concept. The paper illustrates the influence Fichte had on N.F.S.…

The shift of focus from a cognitive to social view has drawn the attention of second language assessment researchers to delve into interactional competence as an intriguing topic in paired oral tests. To fill the gap on how interactional patterns compare across L1 and L2 interactions this study was specifically set to explore and compare 45 paired…

This study examined how top-down control influenced letter-speech sound (L-SS) learning, the initial phase of learning to read. In 2020, 107 Dutch children (53 boys, M[subscript age] = 106.845 months) learned eight L-SS correspondences, either preceded by goal-directed or implicit instructions. Symbol knowledge and artificial word-reading ability…

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /g/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch-German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6-6;0…

Previous research identified that studying texts in a second language (L2) as opposed to the first (L1) results in substantially weaker recall. We hypothesized that use of advance organizers (AOs) might attenuate this L2 recall cost by supporting L2 users in the construction of more solid memory representations. One hundred Dutch-English…

A substantial body of research has examined the role of English in South Africans' linguistic repertoires. Many of these studies have investigated whether a language shift towards English might be underway among first-language (L1) speakers of the indigenous languages. At the same time, the role of English in the repertoires of L1 English speakers…

Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word…

In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

This paper explores the longitudinal development of the phrasicon (i.e. phraseological lexicon) of French-speaking learners of Dutch in two different educational settings: Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and traditional foreign language learning contexts (non-CLIL). We followed 195 pupils and analyzed a corpus of 390 written texts…

This article explores how organizational mobility and foreign nationality affect a researcher's chances of an internal career promotion in university systems that do not have rules preventing inbreeding and where teaching occurs mostly not in English but a local language. As a case study, we have examined the Flemish university system, the Dutch…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of speech intervention provided with a low intensity with speech intervention provided with a high intensity on the speech and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Dutch-speaking children with a cleft palate with or without a cleft lip (CP ± L) between 4 and 12 years. Method: A…