Third language (L3) lexical acquisition is still underexplored. In this article I overview theoretical and empirical evidence on L3 lexical acquisition and the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in learning L3 words. I explain the mechanism of CLI as resulting from language co-activation in the multilingual learner's/user's mind.…

The acquisition of communicative competence in second and foreign languages requires the incorporation of verbal and non-verbal elements. Notwithstanding, few studies have performed empirical research into the acquisition of non-verbal signs. This research studies the learning of emblematic gestures for students of Spanish in the USA using an…

This study investigated the impact of student-selected pairs on emotional engagement and language-learning opportunities generated during collaborative tasks. Sixteen learners of English at a Hong Kong secondary school performed collaborative tasks in two pairing arrangements: student-selected pairing and teacher-assigned pairing (mixed…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

The congruency effect--that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in…

Research suggests new foreign language (FL) words are learned more easily if their phonology follows the phonotactic rules of the native language. Very little is known, however, about the impact of orthography on FL learning. This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms supporting the learning of words with familiar and unfamiliar…

Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and…

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

Purpose: This study builds a new system for automatically assessing learners' speech elicited from an oral discourse completion task (DCT), and evaluates the prediction capability of the system with a view to better understanding factors deemed influential in predicting speaking proficiency scores and the pedagogical implications of the system.…

Within the same learning context, learners' outcomes in terms of oral fluency vary greatly. This study tracked the relative contributions that first language (L1) and initial second language (L2) fluency skill and working memory (WM) made to L2 fluency development. We assessed the performance of French-speaking Grade 6 learners' (n = 47, mean age:…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Access to definitions facilitates the learning of word meanings when novel words are encountered in reading. However, the memorial costs and benefits of inferring word meanings from context, compared to seeing definitions of unfamiliar words before reading, are not yet well understood. We conducted two experiments with adult L1 (English) and L2…

Learners of a nonnull subject language (e.g., English) whose first language (L1) is a null subject language (e.g., Spanish) can show some optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in the second language (L2). By exposing L2 learners to nativelike interpretations of pronouns in discourse, we aim at understanding how exposure can…