In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

Third language (L3) lexical acquisition is still underexplored. In this article I overview theoretical and empirical evidence on L3 lexical acquisition and the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in learning L3 words. I explain the mechanism of CLI as resulting from language co-activation in the multilingual learner's/user's mind.…

Most second language writing studies have approached the L2 Writing phenomenon through the cognitive theoretical lens that situates writing as a mental activity that resembles psychological and mathematical problem-solving (Cumming, 2016, p. 69). "While research on second language writing has expanded exponentially in recent years, it has for…

Extensive evidence indicates that early vocabulary skills predict later reading development among monolingually developing children. Some evidence suggests that a relationship between vocabulary and later reading also holds across languages among children whose home language differs from the school language. However, these findings have been mixed…

Reading ability in English is decisive in determining the academic achievement of university students who study the English language, or any other subject in English. Extensive research has been conducted to explore whether ESL/EFL reading problems are language-specific or general reading problems. In this regard, previous research on the…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…

While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that the girl saw') are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that saw the girl'). Although there are different…

In this commentary, I question Westergaard's argument that third language (L3) data can be used to decide between theories such as Full Transfer Full Access, involving wholesale transfer initially, and Full Transfer Potential, involving property-by-property transfer. I suggest that much L3 data will be amenable to explanation under either theory.…

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard's Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is…

Among the various challenges that adult and other late language learners face on their journey to achieving nativelike proficiency, chunking has been identified as one of the most difficult tasks to master. Language users are able to derive and utilize chunks during language processing -- both in the first (L1) and the second language (L2) -- yet…

In this review, we evaluate the claim that translanguaging in the classroom supports the development of the bilingual lexicon by enhancing cross-linguistic transfer. To address this issue, we integrate findings from psycholinguistics and educational sciences in order to identify how effective pedagogical practices for monolingual children can be…

Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and…

The impact of attitudes on the learning process and on the academic results achieved by students has been the object of numerous studies, which have shown a connection between attitudes and learning. Similarly, the impact of students' attitudes towards learning a foreign language (mainly English) has been explored from a wide range of…

There is a scarcity of research into the relationship between speech perception and production from a multilingual perspective. The present exploratory study investigates longitudinally the acquisition of rhotic sounds in 24 adolescent learners who have the same language repertoires (English, German, Polish), with English being their L2, and…