Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

Research on language and cognitive processes in bilinguals over the past few decades has underscored the activation of words in the first language (L1) during comprehension and production of the second language (L2) (e.g., Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, &…

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 dissertation investigates intuitions about Spanish syllable structure and whether or not word segmentation strategies are affected by these syllabic intuitions. The study utilizes monolingual Spanish speakers, L1 Spanish speakers who are L2 learners of English and L1 English speakers who are L2 learners of Spanish. For Spanish syllabic…

This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as planned instructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in a multilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognate identification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingual primary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identification of…

Bilinguals recognize words with shared morphology and phonology cross-linguistically (i.e., cognates) faster than words that do not have these characteristics. Moreover, higher phonological overlap in cognates enhances the effects, which suggests that phonology eases word recognition. However, it is currently unclear whether words compete purely…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

When bilinguals read in either their first language (L1) or their second language (L2), words from both languages are unconsciously and automatically activated in their mind (e.g., Kroll et al. 2006; Van Heuven and Dijkstra 2002). Many bilinguals, particularly in Florida, choose to learn Portuguese in college as a third language (L3), thus…

High variability phonetic training using perceptual tasks such as identification and discrimination tasks has often been reported to improve L2 perception. However, studies comparing the efficacy of different tasks on different measures are rare. Forty-four Catalan/Spanish bilingual learners of English were trained with identification or…

Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape)…

The multidimensional conceptualization of vocabulary knowledge has been extraordinarily influential in lexical research. Yet, the few studies that have empirically explored the structure of word knowledge conflict regarding its multidimensionality. The present study examines the nature of L2 vocabulary knowledge by exploring how the hypothesized…

The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48 native Spanish speakers whose foreign language was English. They viewed four emotionally negative, four positive, and four neutral videos that, in total, contained 48 emotionally valenced…

Children can teach themselves new words via the process of independent text reading--previous studies on self-teaching heavily focused on learning to read in a first language (L1). Limited work to date has been devoted to second language learning (L2). The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating self-teaching among English Language…