Currently students who struggle with language and literacy learning are classified with various labels in different states--language learning disabilities, dyslexia, specific language impairment, and specific learning disability--in spite of having similar diagnostic profiles. Drawing on the research on comprehension of written language, we…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

There is growing interest in language barriers in health care (LBHC)--interest, that is, in how the quality of health care service delivery might be compromised when patients and health care providers do not share the same first language. This article discusses LBHC as an emerging research area that provides valuable opportunities for researchers…

Previous cross-language research has focused on L1 phonological processing and its relation to L2 reading. Less extensive is the research on the effect that L1 orthographic processing skill has on L2 reading and spelling. This study was designed to investigate how reading and spelling acquisition in English (L2) is influenced by phonological and…

Recent years have brought increasing attention to studies of language acquisition in a country where the language is spoken, as opposed to formal language study in classrooms. Research on language learners in immersion contexts is important, as the question of whether study abroad is valuable is still somewhat controversial among researchers…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

Educational policies that impact second language (L2) learners--a rapidly-growing group--are often enacted without consulting relevant research. This review synthesized research regarding optimal conditions for L2 acquisition, facilitative L2 learner and teacher characteristics, and speed of L2 acquisition, from four bodies of work--foreign…

This dissertation investigates the integration of two sources of non-conformity--exceptionality and variation - in a single phonological system. Exceptionality manifests itself as systematic non-conformity, and variation as partial or variable non-conformity. When both occur within the same phenomenon, this is particularly challenging for the…

A methodological shortcoming in previous second language (L2) acquisition studies has been that researchers have assumed an overly homogenous first language (L1) ignoring dialect differences. In the current study English and German vowel production data were collected from 72 English-speaking learners of German from three distinct North American…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

An important goal of research on specific learning disorders (such as dyslexia, or specific reading disability, or dysgraphia, or specific writing disorder) is to elucidate the universal characteristics and cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences of literacy acquisition and disability. However, despite the acknowledged necessity of…

The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in…

Gestures, i.e. the symbolic movements that speakers perform while they speak, form a closely interconnected system with speech, where gestures serve both addressee-directed ("communicative") and speaker-directed ("internal") functions. This article aims (1) to show that a combined analysis of gesture and speech offers new ways to address…

The present article focuses on data collection through web questionnaires, as opposed to the traditional pen-and-paper method for research in second language acquisition and bilingualism. It is argued that web questionnaires, which have been used quite widely in psychology, have the advantage of reaching out to a larger and more diverse pool of…

This paper first briefly reviews the concept of intelligibility as it has been employed in both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE) research. It then examines the findings of the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a list of phonological features that empirical research has shown to be important for safeguarding mutual intelligibility…