Integrating the tenets of the social context model of L2 acquisition with insights from the parasocial contact hypothesis, the present paper addresses the role of mass media in L2 acquisition and acculturation among young Hungarian speakers in Slovakia. Questionnaire data were collected among Hungarian-speaking secondary school students (N = 310).…

Within psychological consequences of multiculturalism, it is often emphasised that multiculturalism and interculturalism decreases ethnocentrism, and increases openness towards other cultures, and, consequently, ethnic, linguistic and religious tolerance. We tested this empirically poorly supported assumption on high-school students from South…

For professionals working with multilingual children, detecting language deficits in a child's home language can present a challenge. This is largely due to the scarcity of standardized assessments in many children's home languages and missing normative data on multilingual language acquisition. A common approach is to translate existing English…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…