When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of…

The current study investigated whether Russian--English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means "mouth" in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the…

This article reviews research on working memory (WM) and its use in second language (L2) acquisition research. Recent developments in the model and issues surrounding the operationalization of the construct itself are presented, followed by a discussion of various methods of measuring WM. These methods include word and digit span tasks, reading,…

Many adolescent and adult L2 learners in language classrooms, both in the US and other countries, have little or no alphabetic print literacy. Language teachers may turn to SLA research for assistance, yet almost all research on oral SLA has focused on educated, highly-literate learners (Bigelow & Tarone 2004; Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen 2009). The…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…

This booklet forms a part of the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between these two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The papers here deal with the Hungarian writing system. Initial remarks concern the relationship between script and…

This study examined the psycholinguistic implications of using either of two different types of orthography--syllabic and roman--in Native language programs for Cree children with regard to readability, learnability, and the transfer of reading skills to and from reading in an official language (English or French). This study can also be applied…

This paper reviews recent research on English spelling and the alphabet, and examines the alphabet in terms of symbols, letter-names, and sounds. English is considerably less phonetic than most Western languages, with many symbols having more than one sound. This factor makes spelling difficult for learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or…

This bibliography, compiled as an aid to linguists working in contrastive structure studies, is an expanded version of one published in March 1960. One hundred and sixty-six studies printed in the roman alphabet are listed, as well as 37 studies printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. The broad scope of subject coverage includes many documents which…

Research has found that literacy in the first language of a student of English as a second language (ESL) aids in the acquisition of English, but there has been little exploration of the processes that underlie this. This pilot project investigates children's experiences of literacy in their first language (Hebrew), instruction in strategies…

Fifty-three papers on linguistic theory and language research, including a number of prize-winning essays, address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; bilingualism; Chinese modal verbs; early bilingual speech; linguistic metatheory; music and accent discrepancy; diphthongs; hiatus; vowel patterns; suprasegmentals; neologisms; aspects of…