Additional language (L2/Ln) research largely focuses on learners whose first languages are spoken and who are learning additional spoken languages. In the past few decades, sign languages have become increasingly popular for hearing students in schools. These students must not only learn the vocabulary and grammar of sign languages but also manage…

This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal…

In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

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.…

In recent years, Third Language Acquisition (TLA) in Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) research has been debated regarding background languages' impact on learning a target language. While Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research often emphasizes the primary influence of the first language (L1) on the target language, it does not discount the…

The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental sequence. This article underscores the importance of a robust epistemological foundation, advocating for…

Most second language writing studies have approached the L2 Writing phenomenon through the cognitive theoretical lens that situates writing as a mental activity that resembles psychological and mathematical problem-solving (Cumming, 2016, p. 69). "While research on second language writing has expanded exponentially in recent years, it has for…

This dissertation explores first language (L1) transfer and second language (L2) transfer processes and models, such as the full transfer/full access model (FT/FA), the representational deficit/interpretability hypothesis, and the feature reassembly hypothesis (FRH). The typological proximity model (TPM), the cumulative enhancement model (CEM),…

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) over the past decade have largely been driven by the scale of data and computation used to train large neural network-based models. However, these techniques are inapplicable to the vast majority of the world's languages, which lack the vast digitized text datasets available for English and a few other…

Given the importance of collocational knowledge for second language learning, how collocation learning can be facilitated is an important question. The present study examined the effects of three different practice schedules on collocation learning: node massed, collocation massed, and collocation spaced. In the node-massed schedule, three…

Extensive evidence indicates that early vocabulary skills predict later reading development among monolingually developing children. Some evidence suggests that a relationship between vocabulary and later reading also holds across languages among children whose home language differs from the school language. However, these findings have been mixed…

In the current globalized world, English is an international language that makes it possible for people from different language backgrounds to communicate with each other. In this situation, English users in EIL (English as an international language) should be able to comprehend various accents spoken by English speakers from all over the world.…

Reading ability in English is decisive in determining the academic achievement of university students who study the English language, or any other subject in English. Extensive research has been conducted to explore whether ESL/EFL reading problems are language-specific or general reading problems. In this regard, previous research on the…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…

While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…