Numerous studies suggest that bilinguals demonstrate smaller vocabularies than monolinguals, and that bilinguals' breadth of vocabulary knowledge - both expressive and receptive - is linked to input frequencies in each language [e.g. Hoff, E., S. Welsh, S. Place, and K. Ribot. 2014. "Properties of Dual Language Input That Shape Bilingual…

The present study tested whether the switch costs of production-based language switching tasks by trilinguals are due to competition from outside language schemas or from within language systems. We recruited 90 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals in 10th grade in a Tibetan middle school in China to name digits and number words using different…

The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specific picture and word combination, various effects, including the identity facilitation effect…

Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape)…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

This study compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (Italian, Mandarin) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Japanese consonant length (i.e. singleton vs. geminate) according to the phonemic status of length in L1 and experience with Japanese. The participants included two groups of non-native learners of…

This study investigates sources of phonological cross-linguistic influence (CLI) at the initial stages of third language (L3) acquisition in light of the predictions of the second language (L2) Status Factor Model, the Typological Primacy Model, the Cumulative Enhancement Model, the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model. The productions…

The present study investigated whether adult learners of second language (L2) can automatically activate emotional connotation during emotional word recognition as compared native (L1) users and whether L2 use plays a significant role in it. The automaticity of activation was measured through the emotional Stroop task. In this task, emotional…

This study builds upon previous research investigating the construct validity of phraseological complexity as an index of L2 development and proficiency. Whereas previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons of written productions across proficiency levels, the current study compares the "longitudinal" development of…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs.…

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

English is undoubtedly an important language for educational and socio-economic mobility in numerous countries including Malaysia. Regardless of its importance, studies to document English language acquisition among Malaysian children acquiring English in the local context remain scarce. This normative data is imperative for syllabus-designers,…

The present study employs regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) to investigate the effects of L2 speakers' chronic regulatory focus on their L2 pragmatic versus grammatical awareness. It involved the participation of 121 Chinese students, who are English language learners, at a university in the United States. Haws et al.'s (2010) questionnaire…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…