This study attempts to tease apart the effect of dominant languages of communication on the acquisition of syntactic properties of L3 French in order to test the current L3 generative theories. Three groups of bilinguals took part in this study: L1 Persian/L2 English, with French as the dominant language of communication, L1 Persian/L2 English,…

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans…

The Norwegian language has two written standards, Bokmål (majority variety) and Nynorsk (minority variety), and children receive their schooling in one or other of them. Pupils schooled in Nynorsk acquire the Bokmål variety simultaneously through extracurricular exposure and thus develop what may be termed "bidialectal literacy". In this…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

Substantial biliteracy research on two alphabetic languages has indicated that, once it is fostered in the first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading. It is still unclear, however, whether L1 metalinguistic awareness transfers in the same manner across typologically…

Given the exponential growth in international student populations in the United States, supporting cross-cultural language learners (CCLL) in developing their self and co-regulated learning is highly important. This paper presents a conceptual framework on the value of feedback within self-regulated versus co-regulated environments, in the context…

Classifier languages are often described as lacking genuine number morphology and treating all common nouns, including those conceptually count, as an unindividuated mass. This study argues that neither of these popular assumptions is true, and presents new generalizations and analyses gained by abandoning them. I claim that no difference exists…

This article suggests a method to deal with cross-linguistic differences in children with Specific Language Impairment. The differences in vulnerable structures reflect typological properties of the surrounding language (e.g., Leonard 2014a, 2014b). This article adds a developmental perspective to the discussion by interpreting the vulnerable…

Azerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian…

Despite the numerous studies on English article acquisition, the acquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties by English-as-a-second language learners (ELLs) remain to be further explored. With a detailed literature review, this study investigated the acquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties of English articles by ELLs with…

The Functional Discourse Grammar model has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to provide a descriptively, psychologically and pragmatically adequate account of the forms made available by a typologically diverse range of languages; and on the other, to provide a model of language which is set up to reflect, at one remove, certain of the stages…

This thesis investigates the nature of grammatical patterns through an in-depth study of resultative constructions in Mandarin and Thai. At the heart of the thesis lies the proposal that event structure templates--complex, meaning-based grammatical patterns--must be recognised as primary objects of linguistic analysis. As content-theoretic objects…

In this article, we present an analysis of individual factors that influence how well a person can read and understand a text in an unfamiliar, but closely related language--the basis of the so-called teaching of intercomprehension. Our work analyzes these relations from two normally separate perspectives. The first perspective focuses on how…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Transcultural flows of capital, culture and communication have created conditions for the widespread movement of people around the globe, leading to increasing diversity in countries of destination. In contexts of global migration lingua franca English is indispensable in initial and survival communication. For migrants to northern European…