Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

In Serbia, script diversity remains the norm, whereby Serbian is routinely written in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is not free of political contestation. Metadiscourses construct Cyrillic as the authentic script and central to ethnoidentity or, alternatively, as indexing dangerous nationalism, conservatism and Russian-leaning…

Reading comprehension (RC) is a multi-faceted construct but is often assessed with a single instrument. Previous research has highlighted that commonly used RC tests are only mildly correlated and vary in the skills they assess, including the differential contribution of oral language and decoding to children's performance. Our study, framed…

Although motivation is an extensively discussed topic, minor languages deserve more research attention. This qualitative multiple case study explores motivation to learn Czech as a second language in Beginners' Czech language courses for Erasmus students in the Czech Republic through the lens of the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS), searching…

In an increasingly globalised and multilingual world, the use of different scripts in the same semiotic landscape is an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon. For this reason, it is vital to conduct research focusing on multiscriptality in order to better understand the linguistic and semiotic functions of the use of multiple scripts…

We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

The paper presents some general facts about Bulgarian, which is spoken by over 8 million people all over the world and is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. It is shown that language diversity within the country has been relatively constant and modest over the last 90 years (with a clear dominance of Bulgarian). The focus of the…

The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate a multilingual automated essay scoring (AES) system for grading essays in three languages. Two different sentence embedding models were evaluated within the AES system, multilingual BERT (mBERT) and language-agnostic BERT sentence embedding (LaBSE). German, Italian, and Czech essays were…

Purpose: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. Method: One hundred nine children were recorded…

Motor competence as an indicator of gross motor development is characterized by changes in movement patterns and outcomes. The Test of Gross Motor Development-3 consists of six locomotor and seven ball tasks used to assess the quality of fundamental motor skills in children. The purpose of this study is twofold--to produce a Slovenian translation…

The ability to learn new skills as an adult, cognitive stimulation in the ageing process, and a cognitively active lifestyle are of interest to experts in education, public health, and social studies. The game Scrabble, with its enjoyable nature, has gained recognition as an educational resource that facilitates the acquisition and preservation of…

Background: Parental input plays a central role in typical language acquisition and development. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), characterized by social communicative and language difficulties, parental input presents an important avenue for investigation as a target for intervention. A rich body of literature has identified which aspects of…

Language policy is crucial to any society's cultural and political fabric, as it shapes how individuals and groups communicate, interact, and identify. Language policy has important implications for nation-building and the creation of national identity. Language policy can also significantly impact university students' sense of belonging. Overt…

The presented study examines the question of colour categorization in relation to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The study is based on research conducted by Gilbert et al. (2006) and their claim that linguistic colour categorization in a particular language helps colour recognition and speeds the process of colour discrimination for…

We adopted a person-oriented approach to identify patterns of how classroom talk and internal behavioral engagement are combined in students. The research was conducted on a sample of 639 ninth-grade students (32 classes). We measured the duration of classroom talk for each individual student during Czech language and language arts lessons. The…