Studies have found that bilinguals respond differently to personality measures in their two languages, indicating that bilinguals change their personality as they switch between their two languages and/or cultures. Across two experiments, we attempted to investigate the effect of language and culture separately on how bilingual speakers rate…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

In this article, we aim to contribute to the debate about the use of subordination as a measure of language proficiency. We compare two theories of SLA--specifically, processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998) and dynamic systems theory (DST; de Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007)--and, more particularly, how they address the development of…

Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their…

This study sought to explore the ideological and implementational spaces for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies (MPs) in initial teacher education (ITE) policies and curricula across the European Union. The concept of linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to examine inclusive, equity-centred MPs in ITE. A multi-sited…

The question of a sensitive period in language acquisition has been subject to extensive research and debate for more than half a century. While it has been well established that the ability to learn new languages declines in early years, the extent to which this outcome depends on biological maturation in contrast to previously acquired knowledge…

This study investigated the influence of frequency effects on the processing of congruent (i.e., having an equivalent first language [L1] construction) collocations and incongruent (i.e., not having an equivalent L1 construction) collocations in a second language (L2). An acceptability judgment task was administered to native and advanced…

This article reports on the design and use of a profiler for lexical sophistication (i.e., use of advanced vocabulary), which was created to assess the lexical richness of intermediate and advanced Swedish second language (L2) learners' French and Italian. It discusses how teachers' judgments (TJs) of word difficulty can contribute to the…

This article examines the use and choice of address pronouns among Finnish and Finland-Swedish students in various situations. The study is based on a questionnaire on address usage distributed to university students in the city of Vaasa in Finland. The aim of the study is to investigate potential differences between the use of T and V in Finnish…

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written…

A study of the interlanguage of bilinguals and multilinguals compared the oral French proficiency of 20 native Swedish-speaking and 20 Finnish-speaking university students as evidenced in error patterns in oral tests. With the exception of phonological and phonetic errors in pronunciation, errors were classified by word class (article, noun,…

A study investigated certain mechanisms underlying the acquisition of phrasal verbs in English as a Second Language. Subjects were native Finnish- and Swedish-speaking students in Finland, most aged 16-25 years. The subjects were administered a multiple-choice test with each item containing two correct alternatives, a phrasal verb (preferred by…

With a Finnish-speaking majority and a Swedish-speaking minority, Finland offers a striking contrast in the kinds of cross-linguistic influence that can occur in the acquisition of English in a multilingual setting. While much previous research has looked at the differences between Finnish and Swedish influences, our study compares Swedish…