Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

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…

For Spanish nouns, masculine gender is unmarked and feminine is marked. Effects of markedness on gender agreement processing are inconsistent, possibly owing to differences between online methods. This study presents a reanalysis of eye-tracking data from Keating's (2022) study on the processing of noun-adjective gender agreement in speakers of…

The impact of attitudes on the learning process and on the academic results achieved by students has been the object of numerous studies, which have shown a connection between attitudes and learning. Similarly, the impact of students' attitudes towards learning a foreign language (mainly English) has been explored from a wide range of…

This article argues in favour of higher education studies in sign language (SL) related disciplines, more specifically, sign language interpreting and translation (SLIT) -- focusing on the Spanish, and Basque, academic situation and societal needs. Firstly, we offer an overview of higher education SL teaching and SLIT training in Europe and Spain.…

This study attempts to explain a systematic phenomenon that has been described in interlanguage grammars crosslinguistically: Null-Prep, which consists of omitting the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. We propose that Null-Prep is not related to lack of knowledge of "wh"-movement, as previously assumed, but to…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

A central question in multilingualism research is how multiple languages interact. Most studies have focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) effects on a third language (L3), but a small number of studies dedicated to the opposite transfer direction have suggested stronger L3 influence on L2 than on L1 in postpuberty learners. In our study,…

orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…

The study evaluated whether the direction (inhibitory or facilitative) of the phonological neighborhood density effect in English spoken word recognition was modulated by the relative strength of competitor activation (neighborhood type) in two groups of English-dominant learners of Spanish who differed in language experience. Classroom learners…

This book delves into psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of lexical activation, availability, and production in English or Spanish as additional languages in classroom settings. Instead of focusing sociologically and pedagogically on lexical availability, this collective work adopts a cognitive approach. Ten studies, conducted by experienced…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

This study investigates the organization of the mental lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language in contrast to its structure in Spanish as a native language through semantic networks derived from lexical availability or semantic fluency tasks. To this end, we collected the responses of 75 American learners of Spanish and 75 native speakers in…

"Second Language Acquisition -- Learning Theories and Recent Approaches" will aim to present the process of learning an additional language apart from one's native language. The process of understanding, writing, and speaking another language with fluency involves complex intellectual and emotional responses as well as continuous…