The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals.…

The construct of "learning potential" has been proposed to capture differences between learner independent performance and performance during Dynamic Assessment (DA). This paper introduces a new LPS formula implemented in a DA study involving Pakistani learners of L2 Chinese. Learners were randomly assigned to a control or experimental…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

A challenge of large-scale oral communication assessments is to feasibly assess a broad construct that includes interactional competence. One possible approach in addressing this challenge is to use a spoken dialog system (SDS), with the computer acting as a peer to elicit a ratable speech sample. With this aim, an SDS was built and four trained…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

This article reports on two studies, testing how three different types of input (skewed first, skewed random and balanced) affect second language (L2) learning of English present counterfactual (IF-Is) and past counterfactual (IF-IIs) conditionals, two constructions differing in complexity. The experiment included a proficiency test, a pretest, a…

VocQGen is an automated tool designed to generate multiple-choice cloze (MCC) questions for vocabulary assessment in second language learning contexts. It leverages several natural language processing (NLP) tools and OpenAI's GPT-4 model to produce MCC items quickly from user-specified word lists. To evaluate its effectiveness, we used the first…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…

The acquisition of a new morphological rule can be influenced by numerous factors, including the type of feedback provided during learning. The present study aimed to test the effect of different feedback types on children's ability to learn and generalize an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Two groups of eight-year-olds learned to judge and…

The current paper examined the impact of Dynamic Assessment (DA) on the speaking skills of EFL learners applying socio-cultural theory, which was developed by Vygotsky (1934). The study also tried to compare the results from online synchronous DA sessions, which were done in the form of one-to-one online training over Google Meet, with the results…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

Research on linguistic variation suggests that usage patterns are deeply embedded in native and non-native speakers' knowledge of grammar. This study explores the transfer of these variable sociolinguistic patterns at the initial stages of third language acquisition. We elicited narratives in Portuguese from two mirror-image groups of sequential…

This paper documents a cross-sectional look at L1 transfer and L2 contact for learners of English in a UK study abroad (SA) context. The study employed an instructional experimental design over a 6- month period with 34 Chinese students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took…