This longitudinal study modeled lexical development among children who spoke Vietnamese as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Participants (n = 33, initial mean age of 7.3 years) completed a total of eight tasks (four in each language) that measured vocabulary knowledge and lexical processing at four yearly time points.…

This paper investigates the effect of multiple cultures and languages on the bilingual utterances of Libyan children who live in the United States and who have acquired English after they arrived there at ages from 3 to 5. Data analysis is based on the Markedness Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993) in order to determine which language is the unmarked code…

Timor-Leste offers a rich case study of the array of discursive influences on medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in multilingual, post-colonial developing contexts. MOI policy in this young nation is a site of tension between struggles to define national identity in the shadow of colonial language ideologies and the globalised discourses of…

Lexical access in bilinguals is known to be largely non-selective. However, most studies in this area have involved bilinguals whose two languages share the same script. This study aimed to examine bilingual lexical access among bilinguals whose two languages have distinct scripts. Korean-English bilinguals were tested in a phoneme monitoring task…

Up to now, evidence on bilingual disadvantages in language production comes from tasks requiring single word retrieval. The present study aimed to assess whether there is a bilingual disadvantage in multiword utterances, and to determine the extent to which such effect is present in onset latencies, articulatory durations, or both. To do so, we…

The present study examines two factors in relation to English L3 proficiency development and school performance in a third language: (a) parental education and (b) second language exposure within the living community. Participants (n?=?50) are Italian L1 students with German L2 and English L3. All students (eighth grade, 14 years of age) were…

The study investigated the role of word-level and verbal skills in writing quality of learners who spoke English as a first (L1) and second (L2) language. One hundred and sixty-eight L1 and L2 learners (M = 115.38 months, SD = 3.57 months) participated in the study. All testing was conducted in English. There was a statistically significant L1…

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion…

The linguistic transition that usually accompanies immigration is often related to a strong sense of split between two places, languages, identities and emotional settings. What happens, then, when people change countries and languages three, four or even five times during childhood and adolescence? In the present study, focusing on Third Culture…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…

Levy, Mc Veigh, Marful and Andreson (2007) found that naming pictures in L2 impaired subsequent recall of the L1 translation words. This was interpreted as evidence for a domain-general inhibitory mechanism (RIF) underlying first language attrition. Because this result is at odds with some previous findings and theoretical assumptions, we wanted…

Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this…

The purpose of this study was to examine stuttering behavior in German-English bilingual people who stutter (PWS), with particular reference to the frequency of stuttering on content and function words. Fifteen bilingual PWS were sampled who spoke German as the first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Conversational speech was…

This article discusses issues related to oral assessment of school knowledge of L2-educated students. In particular, it examines benefits and disadvantages of students being tested in their L1 (their dominant language) and in their L2 (their language of instruction). The study draws on the data from 37 high school students studying in a content…

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures are reported for a study in which relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals named identical pictures in each of their two languages. Production occurred only in Chinese (the first language, L1) or only in English (the second language, L2) in a given block with the order counterbalanced…