It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn potentially due to their conceptual naturalness. Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. This work aims to unravel the potential factors that contribute to the learnability and the…

The present study implemented a sign-repetition task at two points in time to hearing adult learners of British Sign Language and explored how each phonological parameter, sign complexity, and iconicity affected sign production over an 11-week (22-hour) instructional period. The results show that training improves articulation accuracy and that…

Despite extensive research on language acquisition, our understanding of how people learn abstract linguistic structures remains limited. In the phonological domain, we know that perceptual reorganization in infancy results in attuning to native language (L1) phonetic categories and, consequently, in difficulty discriminating and learning…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but…