Much research has been conducted on factors that impact on second language (L2) speech production in light of the age of L2 acquisition, the length of residence in the L2 environment, motivation, the amount of first language (L1) usage, etc. Very little of this research has taken the perspective of interference between L1 and L2, especially with…

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…

Because language, as a method of communication, is a two-way channel involving both speakers and listeners, a methodical study of linguistic variation should involve an analysis of both, how it is expressed and how it is interpreted. Furthermore, because language is known to vary between individuals (inter-speaker variation) as well as at the…

This study outlines a linguistic profile of two subgroups of Italian English circumstantial bilinguals - one dominant in English and the other dominant in Italian--by exploring for the first time their linguistic repertoire through the Gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009). The scale takes into account language…

In this plenary paper, we present a review of language research in children with cochlear implants along with an outline of a 5-year project designed to examine the lexical access for production and recognition. The project will use auditory priming, picture naming with auditory or visual interfering stimuli (Picture-Word Interference and…

In this article we focus on "false cognates", lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them.…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…

The present study is a corpus-based comparative investigation of Theme and thematic progression in English and Russian. While monolingual thematic studies have a long history in Linguistics, comparative studies are relatively few, in particular for the given language pair. In addition to filling the existing gap in the field of Translation…

Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

This paper mainly explores the impacts of presenting new words in semantically-related (SR) sets on vocabulary learning. 38 students from two classes of Grade 2 in Taiyuan Foreign Language School (Senior High School Section) participate in the whole process. The same vocabulary items unknown to all students are taught to them in 4 lessons. The…

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become a major form of communication in today's day and age whereby language use has been impacted in various areas especially in that of learning and teaching. Young users use literally half their week engaging in SNSs communication, thereby giving rise to a brand of internet slang which is entirely their own.…

This dissertation examines the possible influence of language learners' second language (L2) on their perception of phonological contrasts in their third language (L3). Previous studies on Third Language Acquisition (TLA) suggest various factors as possible sources of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of an L3. This dissertation…

The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2…

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses ("il veut pas payer pour ca [approximately] il veut pas payer pour" "he doesn't want to pay for [it]") and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative…