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.…

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…

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…

Infants attune to their native language during the first two years of life, as attested by decreases in the processing of nonnative phonological sounds and reductions in the range of possible sounds accepted as labels for native words. The present study shows that French-learning infants aged 1;8 can learn new words in an unfamiliar language,…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Reduplication as a word-formation process in Mandarin, which is one of the most difficult knowledge to comprehend for scholar and student. Theoretically this research offers an approach that is different from what has been made by previous researchers. Using the M.D.S Simatupang free context approach this research contrasts the reduplicative forms…

Research involving digital games and language learning is rapidly growing. One advantage of using digital games to support language learning is the ability to collect data on students learning in real time. In this study, we use educational data mining methods to explore the relationship between in-game data and elementary students' Chinese…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

This study investigated the influence of phonological word representations from both first language (L1) and second language (L2) on third language (L3) lexical learning in L1-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. More specifically, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether L1 Spanish and L2 English phonology modulates…

Poor comprehenders (PCs) are characterized by poor reading comprehension despite intact decoding and general cognitive ability. Poor word meaning knowledge is one of the earliest deficits associated with a PC profile. We examined processes underpinning word learning in PCs using a category learning paradigm. Adolescent participants (20 typically…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom language contexts characterized by peer language skills and proportions of dual language learners (DLL) influenced English language development for DLL and non-DLL children. Participants were 2,131 children from 135 classrooms across preschool through Grade 3. Children were classified into…

This article extends recent findings that presenting semantically related vocabulary simultaneously inhibits learning. It does so by adding story contexts. Participants learned 32 new labels for known concepts from four different semantic categories in stories that were either semantically related (one category per story) or semantically unrelated…

Several psycholinguistic theories have appealed to the linguistic notion of markedness to help explain asymmetrical patterns of behavioural data. We suggest that this sort of markedness is best thought of as a derived rather than a primitive notion, emerging when the distributional properties of linguistic categories interact with general-purpose…

We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…

The present study explores the issue of the use of phonetic specificity in the process of learning new words at 20 months of age. The procedure used follows Nazzi and Gopnik [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2001). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: When does language become a tool for categorization? "Cognition," 80, B11-B20].…