This study investigated whether Chinese--Korean bilinguals can use structure-based information to interpret Korean sentences containing floating numeral quantifiers during online processing. A numeral quantifier in Korean can be stranded from its modified noun through scrambling as long as the quantifier forms a constituent with the noun. For…

This study examines whether Japanese native (L1) listeners can implicitly learn stress pattern regularities, not present in their L1, after a brief auditory exposure. In the exposure phase, the participants listened to and repeated words bearing stress patterned after Latin, but with a highly restricted consonant inventory. They performed a…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

Previous studies have investigated how second language (L2) readers construct memory for narrative texts according to causal relations between the events described. This study aims to extend their findings by including semantic text relations (similarity of meaning) as another variable, which are theoretically expected to play an additional role…

This study set out to test the theoretical premise of the SSARC model of pedagogic task sequencing, which postulates that tasks should be sequenced for learners from cognitively simple to complex. This experiment compared the performance of three tasks differing in cognitive complexity in a simple-complex sequence versus in the absence of any…

The present paper describes a contrastive study of interlanguage refusal strategies employed by Korean and Norwegian learners of English as an additional language. The data were collected from multilingual first-year students at an American university in South Korea and in an English-medium program at a Norwegian university by means of an online…

Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…

The role played by working memory (WM), that is, the capacity to temporarily maintain and cognitively process information, has been extensively studied in second language (L2) research. In a general sense, WM has been shown to be related to various aspects of L2 learning and use; however, little information is available regarding its relationship…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

A high-stakes Portfolio-Based Language Assessment (PBLA) protocol that was fully implemented in all Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) programs in 2019 requires instructors and students to set language-learning goals and complete, compile, and reflect on numerous authentic language tasks. Due to the language barriers incurred when…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…

When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

Spelling is a language problem-space, not only a school subject. Successful spelling demands going beyond letter to sound mapping and gaining access to a full representation of the orthographic structure of words. We traced bilingual Catalan/Spanish speakers' spelling performance in Catalan across elementary school in two tasks: isolated words to…