Though Mandarin Chinese dual language immersion (DLI) has been growing rapidly in the U.S., research on this population is still rare. This study explored cross-language transfer of expressive oral vocabulary knowledge and definition skills among students in a Chinese DLI program. We found significant within and cross-language relationships of…

Glossing is a widely used and examined vocabulary learning tool, and one of the major branches of glossing research has compared the relative effects of first language (L1) and second language (L2) glosses on reading comprehension and vocabulary learning. However, the findings in this literature have not been consistent, calling for a…

This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

Chinese has a rich and diverse vocabulary of terms, especially verbs, expressing power relationships. This paper selected 25 power relationship terms from the Chinese Proficiency Scale for International Chinese Education, and used a true-false format to test the differences in acquisition between international students from Confucian cultural…

Previous research has shown that L1-L2 congruency is a facilitative factor in collocation processing. The present study explores the congruency effect between learners' L2 and L3. Thirty-three proficient Norwegian learners with Lithuanian as their L1 and English as their L2 completed a phase acceptability task consisting of three groups of…

Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (Ln) in speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 adult immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands for study or work. Performance for all four language skills turned out to decline monotonically after an age of…

This study investigated the influence of phonological word representations from both first language (L1) and second language (L2) on third language (L3) lexical learning in L1-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. More specifically, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether L1 Spanish and L2 English phonology modulates…

This study aimed to investigate which word-related variables play a role in Dutch-speaking children's L2 word learning through out-of-school exposure prior to classroom instruction in the foreign language. We used different measures to investigate the role of frequency, concreteness, cognateness, and age of acquisition (AoA) in receptive…

In a world where multilinguals outnumbered monolinguals, the study of the third language (L3) acquisition has been an area of interest for many researchers. This case study investigates the lexical cross-linguistic influence of previously acquired languages on the subsequent acquisition of English as L3 by Pomak multilingual speakers residing in…

This study investigates two models of L2 vocabulary acquisition at an advanced L2 level: L1 lemma mediation and the revised hierarchical models. Proponents of the L1 lemma mediation model postulate that advanced L2 learners map L2 words to L1 meanings or concepts, whereas proponents of the revised hierarchical model argue that the increasing…

This two-year longitudinal study examined the role of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English among a group of first, second, and third generation immigrant Spanish-English bilingual children. Starting from a theoretical perspective on linguistic interdependence that takes into account linguistic constructs and their measurement,…

This study identified the reading comprehension strategies that English-speaking college students enrolled in beginner, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language classes at a major Midwestern university in the United States used to comprehend a text in their second language. The findings suggest that readers tended to use the same comprehension…

Supra-segmental features refer to various forms of intonation and how words and sentences are uttered. Such features challenge meaning and comprehension, too. Despite the importance of these features and their reported association with phonological awareness and linguistic comprehension, their effects on reading comprehension have not been…