"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

A shift from language-general to language-specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4-, 8- and 12-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants had…

The theory of Analogical and Exemplar Modeling (AEM) suggests renewed discussion of the formalization of analogy and its possible incorporation in linguistic theory. AEM is a usage-based model founded upon Exemplar Modeling (Bybee 2007, Pierrehumbert 2001) that utilizes several principles of the Analogical Modeling of Language (Skousen 1992, 1995,…

The present study investigated the development of linguistic awareness in children exposed to the early learning of a second language in Grades 3-5 of primary school, i.e. between the ages of 8 and 10. The aim was to determine whether this bilingual experience enhanced the development of phonological awareness in beginning readers in a bilingual…

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture-word interference task: native and…

Regional dossiers aim at providing a concise description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether lexical access is constrained by syllabic structure in Italian. Results extend the available Italian data on the processing of stressed syllables showing that syllabic information restricts the set of candidates to those structurally consistent with the intended word (Experiment 1). Lexical…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical gender facilitation and inhibition in second language (L2) learners' spoken word recognition. Native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender are sensitive to gender marking when hearing and recognizing a word. Gender facilitation refers to when a given noun that is preceded by an…

We examined inattention/overactivity (I/O) over time and in relation to caregiving in three matched groups: (1) Romanian Orphans (RO) with a minimum of eight months' deprivation prior to adoption, (2) Early Adopted (EA) children adopted from Romania prior to age four months, and (3) Canadian Born (CB) non-adopted children. Comparisons among groups…

Psychometric properties of Romanian translations of the "Behavior Problems Inventory-01" ("BPI-01"; Rojahn, Matson, Lott, Esbensen, & Smalls, 2001) and the "Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form" ("NCBRF"; Aman, Tasse, Rojahn, & Hammer, 1996) were explored. Respondents completed the instruments for 115…

This article discusses the problems related to the teaching of the state language, Rumanian, in the context of the Hungarian minority population in Szekler Land, Rumania, and the language ideologies connected to Rumanian on the basis of empirical research. On the one hand, it is argued that at present the methodology of state language teaching in…

This article aims at describing and explaining the effects of a period of Study Abroad spent in the target language country (SA) on foreign language development. Such effects are analysed in the short- and mid-term and in contrast with the impact of a period of formal instruction (FI) previously spent in the home country (AH). It is hypothesised…

The human brain has the fascinating ability to represent and to process several languages. Although the first and further languages activate partially different brain networks, the linguistic factors underlying these differences in language processing have to be further specified. We investigated the neural correlates of language proficiency in a…