In our article, we investigate the complex dynamics of linguistic understandings and mis- or non-understanding within multilingual contexts. Through the lens of sociolinguistic exploration, we navigate the multifaceted landscapes of language use, applying a multi-perspective approach and the triangulation method to explore the depths of linguistic…

We present a new corpus design for multi-lingual corpora that involve intra-speaker variation in different situational-functional contexts, including primarily spoken but also the written mode, with the aim towards enhancing language documentation efforts and resources. We illustrate how this comparative design and the resulting cross-culturally…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Assessing cognitive demand is crucial for research on self-regulated learning; however, discrepancies in translating essential concepts across languages can hinder the comparison of research findings. Different languages often emphasize various components and interpret certain constructs differently. This paper aims to develop a translingual set…

Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

The article studies minority language policy in the situation of an internal division within a speech community. It is based on the example of the Upper Sorbs -- a Slavic minority in Germany. The division within this community is based on language use, the level of assimilation and religion. The Catholic Upper Sorbs have maintained…

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as "wenn" 'if' and "nur wenn" 'only if' are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with "wenn"/"nur wenn" 'if/only if' and a confirmed or…

A particular status of the English language as the language of international communication and connections between the nearly related English and German languages resulted in the emergence of many interlingual borrowings in the Modern English and German language vocabularies. The paper aims to consider the functioning of borrowings (loanwords) in…

This study investigates lexical transfer in four German learners' oral production of L3 Swedish. They have already learned English as an L2. The point of departure is Williams and Hammarberg's [1998. Language switches in L3 production: implications for a polyglot speaking model. "Applied Linguistics," 19, 295-333] case study in which…

It is aimed to reveal the current state in the field of Germanistics on a global scale in this study. In this direction, the Scopus database was searched for the publications in the field of Germanistics, and the publications related to the relevant literature between the years 2018-2022 were examined with bibliometric analysis. The vast majority…

Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., "V with n," illustrated by…

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…