The present study examined the neural correlates of emotion effects evoked by emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns in Chinese-English bilinguals' two languages through the emotion categorization tasks. At the perceptual processing stage, only L2 emotion-label and emotion-laden nouns induced amplified N100 than neutral nouns. At the semantic…

This article reports on an empirical study of L3 Mandarin, aiming to shed light on transfer effects and their interaction with other factors throughout the L3 acquisition trajectory. A fill-in-the-blank task was employed to examine L2 and L3 acquisition of three types of Mandarin sentence-final particle clusters. Participants in the study were…

The present study aims to explore how second language (L2) speakers process four types of presupposition triggers in an online self-paced reading task and an offline acceptability judgment task. The four types of triggers are definite expressions with "the," the factive verb "know," the change-of-state verb "stop" and…

The meaning of positive polar questions (PPQs) is relatively straightforward, so the truth conditions of PPQs can be decided easily. In contrast, the meaning of negative polar questions (NPQs) may vary, and simple yes-no answers to NPQs have seemingly unpredictable interpretations. For example, a simple yes answer to a PPQ like 'Did you have lunch…

Linguistic meaning is generated by the mind and can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculated from the linguistic input is solely objective in nature. However,…

This paper investigates the effects of meaning dominance in the time-course of activation for ambiguous words out of context in a second language (L2) based on two models: the ordered access model, where the most frequent dominant meaning is always accessed first, and the multiple access model, where dominant and subordinate meanings are…

This study investigates the nature of L2 sentence processing mechanisms by examining whether or to what extent the sensitivity to prosody would affect the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity. The study examines how native speakers of a high attachment language would resolve the attachment ambiguity of their second language which has…

Paremiology is a branch of linguistics that studies proverbs and idioms, with their structural, semantic and pragmatic features. The purpose of the study was to distinguish ethnocultural and linguo-cognitive features inherent in Paremiology. For this purpose, the study analyzed family traditions related to weddings in Kazakh, English and Chinese…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…

Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions ("so," "and," "although," or a "full…

Although translation may be considered the "sine qua non" of bilingual legislation, the perceived authenticity and equivalence of different language versions of the same law are contingent on the disavowal of translation. Yet precisely because of such disavowal, translated versions of law are paradoxically valorized as equal in meaning…