Bilingualism is associated with a number of false beliefs, myths and misconceptions, which carry implications for bilingual education and policymaking. While the language used, often in the media, to express such misconceptions may have become more subtle, a negative bias remains and is arguably more difficult to detect and defend against. The…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

Language is a quintessentially human trait. Many decades of neurolinguistic research provided evidence of neural structures which specialize in complex linguistic and cognitive processes supporting human communications. Because the world is multilingual, (Crystal, 2010; de Bot, 2019) a prominent question related to brain processes supporting…

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started…

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Macaro has stated that the choice between a monolingual, immersive, target language-only pedagogy versus a non-immersive, multilingual pedagogy is 'probably the most fundamental question facing second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, language teachers, and policymakers'. Recognizing that prior empirical work on monolingual versus…

Background: Turkish has a rich system of noun suffixes, and although its complex suffixation system may seem daunting, it can actually present a learning opportunity for children. Despite its unique features, Turkish has not been studied extensively, especially in the case of children with language deficits, such as developmental language disorder…

Teachers' language attitudes play a key role in their decision-making, evaluation, and behaviour in the classroom. This is as true in a monolingual environment as it is in a bilingual or multilingual linguistic situation, but it is fair to assume that the two different linguistic environments are associated with the dominance of different…

This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…