When researching socioscientific topics, particularly on the Internet, readers face multiple texts that they must integrate into a coherent mental model. Previous research in monolingual settings has found that comprehension is biased toward readers' prior beliefs (text-belief consistency effect). Considering that the Internet is multilingual,…

The article focuses on whether and to which extent heritage bilinguals make use of their heritage language while developing receptive skills in unknown languages which are either related to the majority language or the heritage language. Thirty four adolescent heritage speakers of Russian and Polish and a control group of thirty three German…

New students arriving from different countries present a challenge to school systems as language barriers prevent them from being placed in regular classes immediately. In Germany, these students are often enrolled in "international classes" before being placed with their fellow classmates. The project "Biology for Everyone"…

This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participants in the telematic simulation IDEELS (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation). The synchronous and asynchronous communication analysed was part of the MiLC Corpus, a multilingual learner corpus of texts written by…

This study in Conversation Analysis investigates the organization of other-initiated repair sequences in American learners of German, i.e., it examines how learners deal with troubles in hearing or understanding that they encounter in naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction. Data for the project were collected during informal interaction in…

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term emigres of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited…

Addresses the principles underlying the merging of interlanguages in multiple-language acquisition. The article claims that there is an "interlanguage logic" in multiple- language acquisition and that one can see the structure of the basic learning strategy in interlanguage creation: "interlingual identification." (seven…