Philosophical theories are often repudiated, or taken to be repudiated, by identifying counter-examples. These counter-examples are typically based upon our natural response to a real or hypothetical scenario, also called our intuition about the scenario. This methodology of appealing to intuition has been the focus of recent debates about…

Linguistic research has shown that Spanish speakers mark clauses with the subjunctive when they consider the information value of those clauses to be low. Despite widespread agreement among linguists, however, the information-value approach to the subjunctive is largely ignored in textbooks and workbooks. This article explains how the…

The present acoustic-phonetic study explores whether voicing and devoicing assimilations of French fricatives are equivalent in magnitude and whether they operate similarly (i.e., complete vs. gradient, obligatory vs. optional, regressive vs. progressive). It concurrently assesses the contribution of speakers' articulation rate to the proportion…

The present study aims to investigate how trilinguals process their two non-dominant languages and how those languages influence one another, as well as the relative importance of the dominant language on their processing. With this in mind, 24 French (L1)- English (L2)- and Spanish (L3)-unbalanced trilinguals, deemed equivalent in their L2 and L3…

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the…

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

Across languages, children do not comprehend 3SG/3PL subject-verb agreement before age five, despite early mastery in spontaneous speech. This study investigates subject-verb agreement in a language hitherto not studied in this respect, namely Dutch. The authors examine if (1) Dutch two- and three-year-olds comprehend subject-verb agreement and…

Cumulating evidence suggests that the establishment of high-quality phonological representations is the "cognitive precursor" that facilitates the acquisition of language (spoken, signed, and written). The authors present two studies that contrast the nature of bilingual profoundly deaf children's phonological representations derived…

Optionality is a central phenomenon in second language acquisition (SLA), for which any adequate theory must account. Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) offer an appealing approach to it, using Roeper's Multiple Grammars Theory, which was created with first language in mind but which extends very naturally to SLA. They include…

Reviewing and discussing the development of critical studies in the field of applied linguistics in general and English language teaching (ELT) in particular in Iran, this paper attempts to highlight the main contributions in this field. Introducing a new growing critical-oriented shift in Iranian ELT community as the one which has been mostly…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

This paper explores the ideologies of English in China through a meta-discursive analysis of Chinese netizens' comments on the performance of English by Huang Xiaoming, a famous Chinese actor. By applying Park and Wee's framework for analysing ideological evaluations of appropriation (i.e. ideologies of allegiance, competence, and authenticity) to…