Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

This commentary discusses Westergaard's (2021) keynote article, which presents a comprehensive model of first language (L1), second language (L2), and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary presents evidence from a previous study of L3 learners that provides support for Westergaard's property-by-property transfer proposal. The commentary…

This study examines the role of cross-linguistic transfer versus general processing strategy in two groups of heritage speakers (n = 28 per group) with the same heritage language -- Russian -- and typologically different dominant languages: English and Estonian. A group of homeland Russian speakers (n = 36) is tested to provide baseline…

Although the simple view of reading and other theories suggest that listening comprehension is an important determinant of reading comprehension, previous research on linguistic transfer has mainly focused on the role of first language (L1) decoding skills in second language (L2) reading. The present study tested the assumption that listening…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…