Studies analysing the metatalk generated in collaborative writing (CW) tasks have primarily targeted secondary or adult students who wrote either in L1 or L2, and have seldom examined the process of their writing in two languages. Furthermore, these analyses have mostly focused on accuracy discussions and have ignored discussions aimed at making…

Previous research has shown that bilinguals respond differently to moral dilemmas posed in each of their languages, tending to make deontologically-based decisions (based on right or wrong) in their first language and utilitarian decisions (bringing about the most good) in their second language. In the present study, we tested several predictors…

This study investigated the relative contributions of English morphological and vocabulary knowledge to second language (L2) reading comprehension among 100 adult Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study also investigated the extent to which the roles of morphological and vocabulary knowledge in L2 reading comprehension…

Morphological variability in bilingual language production is widely attested. Producing inflected words has been found to be less reliable and consistent in bilinguals than in first-language (functionally monolingual) L1 speakers, even for bilingual speakers at advanced proficiency levels. The sources for these differences are not well…

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

This paper examined whether a younger starting age of formal instruction on a foreign language is beneficial in expanding circle countries. An experimental study was designed to examine to what extent the five varieties of English language teachers are intelligible to Japanese- (JSLs) and Korean-speaking language learners (KSLs), who have…

Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…

This study investigates how children lexicalize motion event patterns in their first and second languages, L1- Turkish and L2-English. English is a satellite-framed language that conflates motion with manner expressed in the main verb and path in a non-verbal element, whereas Turkish is a verb-framed language that conflates motion with path in the…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

This study describes a vocabulary size test in Arabic used with 339 native speaking learners at school and university in Saudi Arabia. Native speaker vocabulary size scores should provide targets for attainment for learners of Arabic, should inform the writers of course books and teaching materials, and the test itself should allow learners to…

This longitudinal study investigated to what extent the acquisition of cognates among bilingual children depends on the degree of cross-language similarity and intensity of exposure to the tested language, and whether children's sensitivity to cognates with different degrees of cross-language similarity changes over time. For three consecutive…