Languages, Volume 7, Issue 3 (September 2022) – 88 articles

Recent research on Singlish, also known as Colloquial Singapore English, suggests that it is subject to ethnic variation across the three major ethnic groups in Singapore, namely Chinese, Malay, and Indian. Discourse particles, said to be one of the most distinctive features of the language, are nevertheless commonly used by bilinguals across all three ethnic groups. This study seeks to determine whether there are ethnic differences in the pitch contours of Singlish discourse particles produced by Singlish speakers. Four hundred and forty-four tokens of three Singlish particles, sia₂₄, meh_55, and what₂₁, produced by the three groups of English-speaking bilingual speakers were drawn from the National Speech Corpus, and the pitch contours extracted and normalized. Statistical analysis of the overall pitch contours, the three acoustic parameters of mean pitch, pitch range, and pitch movement, and the variability of these parameters showed that the effect of ethnicity on the three acoustic parameters was not statistically significant and that the pitch contours of each particle were generally similar across ethnic groups. The results of this study suggest that Singlish may be acquired as a first language by Singaporean speakers, pre-empting any ethnic differences in the production of the particles that might otherwise have resulted from the speakers’ differing language repertoires. Full article

Turkish is a language described as relying predominantly on non-finite subordination in the domain of clause combining. However, there are also strategies of finite subordination, as well as means of syndetic and asyndetic paratactic clause combining, especially in the informal settings. Clause combining is and has been one of the focal points of research on heritage Turkish (h-Turkish). One point is particularly clear: In comparison with the monolingual setting, finite means of clause combining are more frequent in h-Turkish in Germany, the U.S., and the Netherlands, while non-finite means of clause combining are less frequent. Overall, our results confirm the findings of earlier studies: heritage speakers in Germany and the U.S. prefer paratactic means of clause combining using connectors, as opposed to monolingual speakers. Our results also reveal that age (adolescents vs. adults) and register (informal vs. formal) significantly modulate the use of connectors. Moreover, we find that the shift in preferences in means of clause combining triggers an expansion in the system of connectors and leads to the development of new narrative connectors, such as o zaman and derken. The system of syndetic paratactic clause combining is expanding in heritage Turkish. This expansion calls for multifaceted modeling of change in heritage languages, which integrates language-internal factors (register), dynamics of convergence with the contact languages, and extra-linguistic factors (age and language use). Full article

This study examines the plasticity of native language intonation in English-Austrian German sequential bilinguals who have migrated to Austria in adulthood by comparing it to that of monolingual English and monolingual Austrian control speakers. Intonation was analysed along four intonation dimensions proposed by the L2 Intonation Learning theory (LILt): the inventory of categorical phonological elements (‘systemic’ dimension), their phonetic implementation (‘realizational’), the meaning associated with phonological elements (‘semantic’), and their frequency of use (‘frequency’). This allowed us to test whether each intonation dimension is equally permeable to L2-on-L1 influences. The results revealed L2-on-L1 effects on each dimension. These consistently took the form of assimilation. The extent of assimilation appeared to depend on whether the cross-language differences were gradient or categorical, with the former predominantly resulting in intermediate merging and the latter in a complete transfer. The results suggest that native intonation remains plastic in all its dimensions, resulting in pervasive modifications towards the L2. Finally, in this first application of the LILt to the context of L1 attrition, the study confirms the model’s suitability not only to acquisition of L2 intonation but also for predicting where modifications of L1 intonation are likely to occur. Full article

This paper investigates additive links to discourse alternatives in picture comparison dialogues produced by adult native speakers of English and German. Additive relations are established across turns when participants are confirming the presence of matching objects on both pictures (A: “I have X”. B: “I also have X”). Speakers thereby describe their own picture and construe the interlocutor (or rather: the interlocutor’s picture) as a discourse alternative. Whereas the vast majority of the confirming descriptions in German contain an additive particle (auch), less than half of the corresponding confirmations in the English data do (“also”, “too”, etc.). Numbers differ even more drastically in polarity questions (“Do you (also) have X?”) that are equally typical for the dialogue task. Such frequency differences are at odds with recent accounts treating additive particles as being quasi obligatory when their presupposition is satisfied. An in-depth contrastive analysis of lexical, syntactic and information structural properties reveals that the default mapping of information units on syntactic functions (subject) in conjunction with the SVO word order of English leads to a structure in which subject, initial (topic) position and the particle’s associated constituent coincide. This would make the relation to its discourse alternative more prominent than warranted by the dialogue task and speakers of English leave this relation unmarked or resort to alternative constructions instead. The V2 syntax of German, on the other hand, allows for a dissociation of discourse topic and associated constituent. It allows the speaker to topicalize reference to the matching object, to highlight the confirmation of its presence on the speaker’s picture, and to relate the changing information to its discourse alternative in a non-contrastive way. Full article

Auditory word recognition in the non-dominant language has been suggested to break down under noisy conditions due, in part, to the difficulty of deriving a benefit from contextually constraining information. However, previous studies examining the effects of sentence constraints on word recognition in noise have conflated multiple psycholinguistic processes under the umbrella term of “predictability”. The present study improves on these by narrowing its focus specifically on prediction processes, and on whether the possibility of using semantic constraint to predict an upcoming target word improves word recognition in noise for different listener populations and noise conditions. We find that heritage, but not second language, Spanish listeners derive a word recognition-in-noise benefit from predictive processing, and that non-dominant language word recognition benefits more from predictive processing under conditions of energetic, rather than informational, masking. The latter suggests that managing interference from competing speech and generating predictions about an upcoming target word draw on the same cognitive resources. An analysis of individual differences shows that better inhibitory control ability is associated with reduced disruption from competing speech in the more dominant language in particular, revealing a critical role for executive function in simultaneously managing interference and generating expectations for upcoming words. Full article

This paper deals with the distribution of the use of the accusative as an indirect object in two major dialect groups of Modern Greek, namely Northern Greek and Pontic Greek. The loss of the dative in Medieval Greek (c. 10th c. AD) resulted in the use of the genitive as an indirect object in the southern varieties and of the accusative in Northern Greek and Asia Minor Greek. As Standard Modern Greek employs the genitive, little attention has been paid to the distribution of the accusative, and our study was aimed to fill that gap by presenting data collected in Northern Greece from speakers of both dialect groups. According to our findings, the accusative is exclusively used in all syntactic domains inherited from the Ancient Greek dative in both dialect groups, but the two groups are kept apart in terms of the obligatoriness vs. optionality or lack of clitic doubling and availability vs. lack of “high” positions, e.g., for external possessors and ethical dative constructions. Full article

Some studies on the L1 acquisition of aspect in various child languages have discovered that imperfective aspect is acquired later than perfective aspect, whereas others find early adult-like performance. A variety of explanations has been advanced, particularly problems (i) with the semantics of imperfective aspect in combination with telic predicates, (ii) inferring the intended temporal antecedent in a discourse, and (iii) reasoning about an agent’s intentions to complete the event when observing a situation of an event in progress. The current study aimed to disentangle which of the purported explanations can best explain the acquisition patterns. Twenty-three Spanish monolingual children (mean age 5;11) and 17 adults were presented with telic sentences with one of two aspectual tenses in Spanish (pretérito indefinido and pretérito imperfecto). Using a picture-selection task and presenting the sentences either in a narrative setting or in a non-narrative setting, participants were prompted to choose between complete, ongoing, and incomplete situations. In the non-narrative setting children’s interpretation of imperfecto was adult-like, but in the narrative setting it was not. The target-like interpretation in the non-narrative setting reveals that the semantics of imperfecto in telic-imperfective sentences has been acquired (contra explanation i). Furthermore, Spanish five-year-olds did not depend on cues for agent intentionality when interpreting the imperfecto (contra explanation iii). The discrepancy between narrative and non-narrative setting suggests the challenge lies in discourse integration (supporting explanation ii). Full article

In this study, we present improvements in N-best rescoring of code-switched speech achieved by n-gram augmentation as well as optimised pretraining of long short-term memory (LSTM) language models with larger corpora of out-of-domain monolingual text. Our investigation specifically considers the impact of the way in which multiple monolingual datasets are interleaved prior to being presented as input to a language model. In addition, we consider the application of large pretrained transformer-based architectures, and present the first investigation employing these models in English-Bantu code-switched speech recognition. Our experimental evaluation is performed on an under-resourced corpus of code-switched speech comprising four bilingual code-switched sub-corpora, each containing a Bantu language (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, or Setswana) and English. We find in our experiments that, by combining n-gram augmentation with the optimised pretraining strategy, speech recognition errors are reduced for each individual bilingual pair by 3.51% absolute on average over the four corpora. Importantly, we find that even speech recognition at language boundaries improves by 1.14% even though the additional data is monolingual. Utilising the augmented n-grams for lattice generation, we then contrast these improvements with those achieved after fine-tuning pretrained transformer-based models such as distilled GPT-2 and M-BERT. We find that, even though these language models have not been trained on any of our target languages, they can improve speech recognition performance even in zero-shot settings. After fine-tuning on in-domain data, these large architectures offer further improvements, achieving a 4.45% absolute decrease in overall speech recognition errors and a 3.52% improvement over language boundaries. Finally, a combination of the optimised LSTM and fine-tuned BERT models achieves a further gain of 0.47% absolute on average for three of the four language pairs compared to M-BERT. We conclude that the careful optimisation of the pretraining strategy used for neural network language models can offer worthwhile improvements in speech recognition accuracy even at language switches, and that much larger state-of-the-art architectures such as GPT-2 and M-BERT promise even further gains. Full article

Light Warlpiri is a newly emerged Australian mixed language that systematically combines nominal structure from Warlpiri (Australian, Pama-Nyungan) with verbal structure from Kriol (an English-lexified Creole) and English, with additional innovations in the verbal auxiliary system. Lexical items are drawn from both Warlpiri and the two English-lexified sources, Kriol and English. The Light Warlpiri verb system is interesting because of questions raised about how it combines elements of its sources. Most verb stems are derived from Kriol or English, but Warlpiri stems also occur, with reanalysis, and stems of either source host Kriol-derived transitive marking (e.g., hit-im ‘hit-TR’). Transitive marking is productive but also variable. In this paper, we examine transitivity and its marking on Light Warlpiri verbs, drawing on narrative data from an extensive corpus of adult speech. The study finds that transitive marking on verbs in Light Warlpiri is conditioned by six of Hopper and Thompson’s semantic components of transitivity, as well as a morphosyntactic constraint. Full article

Less-resourced languages are usually left out of phonetic studies based on large corpora. We contribute to the recent efforts to fill this gap by assessing how to use open-access, crowd-sourced audio data from Lingua Libre for phonetic research. Lingua Libre is a participative linguistic library developed by Wikimedia France in 2015. It contains more than 670k recordings in approximately 150 languages across nearly 740 speakers. As a proof of concept, we consider the Inventory Size Hypothesis, which predicts that, in a given system, variation in the realization of each vowel will be inversely related to the number of vowel categories. We investigate data from 10 languages with various numbers of vowel categories, i.e., German, Afrikaans, French, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Basque. Audio files are extracted from Lingua Libre to be aligned and segmented using the Munich Automatic Segmentation System. Information on the formants of the vowel segments is then extracted to measure how vowels expand in the acoustic space and whether this is correlated with the number of vowel categories in the language. The results provide valuable insight into the question of vowel dispersion and demonstrate the wealth of information that crowd-sourced data has to offer. Full article

In many sign languages, space is used to express grammatical features. However, verb agreement in space is noticeably slow to appear in emerging sign languages. Many reasons have been proposed to explain this delay or even absence: the reduced size of the community, the recent creation of the sign language and the lack of exposure to a fully formed language. To examine the way space is used to express agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL), a new signed language from the peninsula of Yucatán (Mexico), a task was conducted using video stimuli created to elicit ditransitive constructions showing transfer events, such as events of giving or taking. Results show that agreement is present early in YMSL, even from the first generation of deaf signers. While many signers used single agreement constructions, the second generation of deaf children systematically employed double agreement constructions, placing them on the high end of the evolutionary path proposed for verb agreement in sign languages. I argue that cultural habits of the surrounding community, namely the preference for a geocentric frame of reference among Yucatec Maya speakers, is what facilitates the early emergence of the use of space to express agreement in YMSL. Full article

A strategy is often needed in the communication process to support smooth interaction. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the barriers and strategies of intercultural Manadonese and Japanese communication in Japan. An open questionnaire model was used to obtain data for both natives, as 182 respondents submitted complete results with an age range between 20 and 60 years old. The data instrument also contained five questions on the barriers and implementation of intercultural communication strategies. However, the strategies of the Japanese and Manadonese natives had obstacles in their implementation. Because of cultural and social differences, the methods by which different levels of understanding are utilized were considered. The results showed that this communication strategy had a significant high-level cultural difference, according to the Manadonese native perspective. Meanwhile, the Japanese focused on the parties subject to the application of the strategy, which subsequently showed high respect for the interlocutor. Full article

Previous research in speech perception has shown that perception is influenced by social factors that can result in behavioral consequences such as reduced intelligibility (i.e., a listeners’ ability to transcribe the speech they hear). However, little is known about these effects regarding Spanish speakers’ perception of heritage Spanish, Spanish spoken by individuals who have an ancestral and cultural connection to the Spanish language. Given that ideologies within the U.S. Latino community often equate Latino identity to speaking Spanish “correctly” and proficiently, there is a clear need to understand the potential influence these ideologies have on speech perception. Using a matched-guised methodology, we analyzed the influence of speaker social background information and listener social background information on speech perception. Participants completed a transcription task in which four different Spanish heritage speakers were paired with different social guises to determine if the speakers were perceived as equally intelligible under each guise condition. The results showed that social guise and listener social variables did not significantly predict intelligibility scores. We argue that the unique socio-political culture within the U.S. Latino community may lead to different effects of language ideology and social expectation on speech perception than what has been documented in previous work. Full article

In this work, we investigate a special type of CS below word level, which is observed in mixed compound words. In particular, we discuss mixed Italian–German compounds; this combination is particularly interesting since, in the two languages, the process of compounding follows different rules for what concerns the position of the head, as well as gender and number inflection. An Acceptability Judgment Task was administered to some bilingual speakers, who assessed the acceptability of mixed compounds inserted in both German and Italian clauses. Our conclusion is that it is possible to have mixed compounds, though this option is severely constrained, especially because of the different word order parameters exhibited by the two languages. Full article

The current study investigates self-repairs in the speech of three groups of Russian speakers: monolingual controls (N = 12) residing in the Russian Federation, for whom Russian is their first dominant language (L1); bilingual Russian–Hebrew speaking participants (N = 12), who acquired Russian as their Heritage Language (HL) in contact with the dominant Societal Hebrew in Israel; and bilingual Russian–Chinese speakers (N = 12) residing in the Russian Federation at the time of testing, for whom Russian is their second language (L2). Picture-elicited narratives were coded for instances of self-repairs, split into Conceptualizer Repairs (C-repairs)—which imply pragmatic, semantic, or lexical changes—and Formulator Repairs (F-repairs), correcting different types of errors. In addition, self-repair initiators—such as cut-offs, hesitation pauses, and discourse markers—were annotated before each instance of self-repair. The results indicate that L2 speakers, in general, use self-repairs more frequently than L1 and HL speakers. L1 speakers hardly produced F-repairs, while HL and L2 speakers resorted to both C- and F-repairs. L1 speakers mainly used C-repairs for appropriacy, whereas HL and L2 speakers used C-repairs for rephrasing and lexical item change. As for F-repairs, HL speakers tended to change pronunciation and morphology, while L2 speakers implemented more morphological repairs. Lexical initiators of self-repairs were more common in L1 speech; however, in the L2 group we saw much more frequent cut-offs of repaired speech fragments. As such, varying self-repair strategies were employed by different speaker groups, shedding light on the underlying processes of language production. There was also evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of non-lexical self-repair initiators: HL speakers resorted to prolongations as initiators in HL-Russian (a strategy that is common in their dominant language, Hebrew), whereas L1 speakers used vocalized and silent pauses more frequently. Full article

Previous research and the BIA+ model support the hypothesis of language nonselective access during bilingual word recognition with language-ambiguous words like cognates organized in two distinct lexical representations. This paper adds to the existing literature by investigating how task demands and language proficiency influence cognate processing. Twenty-six Danish-English bilinguals with upper-intermediate to advanced L2 proficiencies performed four visual lexical decision tasks in which stimulus list composition (pure or mixed) and target language (L1 or L2) were varied. This study thus distinguishes itself from other studies by employing a within-subjects design to investigate a bilingual’s two languages. Significant cognate inhibition effects were found in the L2 mixed language condition while none of the other three tasks yielded significant results. Especially the absence of cognate facilitation effects in the L2 pure language condition was remarkable given the findings of previous literature. With reference to the BIA+ model’s assumptions of differing resting level activations for L1 and L2 lexical representations, the impact of L2 proficiency on cognate processing was tested in a post-hoc analysis dividing participants into two groups. This analysis revealed cognate facilitation effects for L2 upper-intermediate bilinguals in the L2 pure language condition while the results of the L1 tasks for both groups of bilinguals remained non-significant. The results therefore suggest that within-subject cognate processing is modulated by L2 proficiency in certain circumstances. Full article

How do individuals change their minds as a result of argumentation? It is generally assumed the speech act of argumentation can trigger a change of mind in the other party—the perlocutionary act of convincing. This means that a discussant changes her commitment relative to the proposition under scrutiny when the other party presents argumentation that is in some way convincing or persuasive. I challenge this received view by showing that argumentation cannot trigger this change of commitment in the way that scholars commonly assume. Convincing cannot be triggered by assertives that are already in the listener’s commitment set, nor can it be triggered by assertives that are newly introduced in the discussion. Using the notion of “joint commitment” I propose an alternative account according to which change of mind is the result of two speakers jointly experiencing facts as stipulated by a joint commitment. I conclude the paper by sketching the impact of such an approach in the study of argumentation and provide suggestions for further developments. Full article

The present study examined the predictions the Perceptual Assimilation Model in the context of naïve bilingual speakers while also considering whether the predictions of third language (L3) models of morphosyntax could be extended to L3 phonology. In particular, it was asked whether several groups of Spanish-English bilinguals (constituting a fully combined design) would categorize sounds in two unknown languages, French and German, using their first language (L1) categories, second language (L2) categories, or a combination of both. 199 participants took part in the study, who made up 4 total groups: L1 English–L2 Spanish (n = 55), L1 Spanish–L2 English (n = 59), English monolingual (n = 59) and Spanish monolingual (n = 29). The participants completed a vowel categorization task, where they were asked to match four vowel sounds in French and German to their existing English and Spanish categories. The results of a series of Bayesian Multinomial regression models suggested that bilinguals categorize L3 vowels using both L1 and L2 categories according to the acoustics of the input. There was no evidence of a clear bias for either the L1 or L2 when an L3 vowel exists in both the L1 and L2. Additionally, the bilingual English participants differed from English monolinguals in the their categorization of new language sounds. These results have implications for both the PAM-L2 and L3 models, by showing that the language learners are not solely guided by their native language, and have access to both L1 and L2 categories when accounting for novel language sounds. Full article

Chinese verb separation is a grammatical construction in which a bimorphemic verb compound separates and expands into a verb phrase. For example, to say “sang one song”, one must insert the aspect marker le and classifier phrase yī shǒu between the verb chàng gē ‘sing-song’ as in chàng le yī shǒu gē (sing-LE-one-classifier-song). Adult second language (L2) learners face at least three problems related to acquiring verb separation: separation patterns are complex and numerous, classroom oral input is limited, and L1 transfer often fails. To better understand L2 learners’ acquisition of verb separation, this study tested 28 adult L2-Chinese classroom learners. Three tasks were administered online: verb decomposition, grammaticality judgment, and oral translation. On average, only 37% of verbs were accurately decomposed, 63% of verbs were accurately judged to be grammatical, and 19% of verbs were orally produced with the correct separation pattern. Chinese verb separation, particularly decomposition and oral production, is thus extremely challenging for L2 learners to acquire—even for advanced learners with a relatively large vocabulary size. The results are discussed in terms of the Unified Competition Model and L2 Chinese pedagogy. Full article

This paper aims to provide the readers with an overview of the nature of sound symbolism in Italian and offers new food for thought to scholars in the under-researched field of sound symbolism in translated literature for young readers. Whilst English uses ideophones in literature for young readers, Italian sound symbolism often seems to rely on Anglophonic creations, arguably due to both linguistic and cultural reasons. The third and fourth books of the series for children and young adults, ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’, have been taken as a source for examples. The books contain both text and pictures, which include ideophones in them. Each of the two English books has been analysed together with their Italian versions, and the strategies employed to translate sound symbolism have been catalogued into a small corpus. The results, on top of elucidating the nature of Italian sound symbolism, show a considerable degree of adaption and a frequent reliance on Anglophonic forms, with scattered attempts made at adapting English ideophones for the Italian readership. This is achieved through the modification of source forms to resemble Italian syntactical structures more closely and through the removal of certain consonant clusters that are considered typically Anglophonic (i.e., <th>, <sh>). Full article

For researchers, the typical way of determining whether a pedagogical innovation works is by conducting an experiment. In migrant settings, however, experiments are more challenging to carry out due to the diversity of the learner population. Unfortunately, how to deal with these challenges is not addressed in a practical way in research methods textbooks, which typically provide a normative view of the research process. This paper aims to draw attention to the realities of classroom research carried out in the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) setting. These classes consist of adult immigrants and refugees from a wide range of cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds. We illustrate how this diversity along with other characteristics of LINC programs impact the decision-making of the researcher with respect to a pedagogical experiment focused on pragmatics. The study compared a formula-enhanced approach to teaching speech acts to the more mainstream approach aimed at raising learners’ meta-pragmatic awareness about speech act behaviour. The pre-post-delayed-post-test gains appear to favour the Formula group, but the interpretability of these results is compromised by the fact that the composition of the two classes was very different. Discussion of the limitations of this case study feeds into a broader consideration of the implications for classroom research of linguistic and cultural diversity typical of L2 educational contexts like LINC. Full article

Using the social semiotic multimodal approach, this study compared the transformation and transduction moves of eight Spanish heritage language learners (SHLs) and six second-language learners (L2s) as they composed collaborative and individual digital stories (DSs) in an undergraduate advanced Spanish writing class. The research analyzed the learners’ composing processes regarding digital synesthesia when working collaboratively and individually as they integrated written, oral, aural, and visual semiotic resources. The data revealed that SHLs demonstrated more frequent and more complex digital synesthesia than did their L2 classmates during their quest for digital multimodality in Spanish, indicating improvement via task repetition in frequency and variety of integrated modes. Full article

This paper examines in detail the morpho-syntax of the verbal phrase in Paraguayan Guarani, in root and complement clauses, and argues that while the ordering relation between the verb and its associated functional morphemes is congruent with the syntax (cf. the Mirror Principle), the ordering of post-verbal arguments is best understood in terms of phonological linearization. More specifically, it is argued that there are language-particular prosodic requirements that force the post-verbal arguments to be phonologically linearized outside the accentual domain defined by the verb and its associated functional morphemes. Full article

Code-switching (CSW) is the phenomenon where speakers use two or more languages in a single discourse or utterance—an increasingly recognised natural product of multilingualism in many settings. In language teaching and learning in particular, code-switching has been shown to bring in many pedagogical benefits, including accelerating students’ confidence, increasing their access to content, as well as improving their participation and engagement. Unfortunately, however, current educational technologies are not yet able to keep up with this ‘multilingual turn’ in education, and are partly responsible for the constraint of this practice to only classroom contexts. In an effort to make progress in this area, we offer a data-driven position paper discussing the current state of affairs, difficulties of the existing educational natural language processing (NLP) tools for CSW and possible directions for future work. We specifically focus on two cases of feedback and assessment technologies, demonstrating how the current state-of-the-art in these domains fails with code-switching data due to a lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks and lack of end-to-end user-facing educational applications. We present some empirical user cases of how CSW manifests and suggest possible technological solutions for each of these scenarios. Full article

This empirical case study explores the (co-)construction and negotiation of identities through code-switching (CS) as found on the video-sharing platform YouTube, disentangling the complexities of social practice anchored in a discursive online environment. Drawing on a YouTube comment corpus and paying special attention to the socio-technical affordances of the platform, the study examines users’ positioning practices and metapragmatic replies in response to a culturally themed video priming discussion about LatinX family stereotypes. More specifically, it analyses how users discursively position themselves vis-à-vis the video and which linguistic strategies they exploit to (co-)construct and negotiate their cultural identity. Focusing on interrelated positioning devices such as code-choice, identity labels and quoting, this contribution proposes a multi-level model of analysis to account for the dynamic interplay between CS practices and identity construction in a heterogeneous online space. Following a social-constructivist approach to identity, CS is shown to reinforce in-group solidarity rooted in the shared experience and discussion of LatinX culture and provides evidence of a sense of togetherness in an emerging community of practice. Full article

This study evaluates whether the short version of the German LITMUS quasi-universal nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR) can be used as an index test for monolingual and early second language learners (eL2) of German aged 8 to 10 years. The NWR taps into quasi-universal phonological knowledge via the so-called language-independent part and into language-specific phonological knowledge via the language-dependent part. Thirty-six monolingual and thirty-three eL2 learners of German, typically developing (TD) and diagnosed as language-impaired (DLD), participated in the study. The effects of the language group (Mo vs. eL2) and the clinical status (TD vs. DLD) on repetition accuracy are investigated by a logistic mixed-model analysis. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and likelihood ratios are calculated to determine the diagnostic accuracy of the two parts. The group comparisons showed significant effects of the clinical status but not of the language group. The ROC analyses and the likelihood ratios reveal better diagnostic values for the language-dependent compared to the language-independent part and almost similar diagnostic values for the monolingual and the eL2 group. The results indicate that the LITMUS-QU-NWR helps to disentangle DLD and DLD in monolingual children and eL2 learners aged 8 to 10 years. Full article

This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense, and, subsequently, their translations in the other languages, distinguishing between two registers within the novel, i.e., dialogue and narration. We found that the vast majority of the Spanish tenses are translated one-to-one to their counterparts in the three languages, especially in narration. In dialogue, we found several deviations, which we could partially account for within an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing to the notion of markedness along two different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past) and aspect (imperfective versus perfective). Full article

The processing and resolution of syntactically ambiguous structures is accounted for by serial autonomous and multiple constraint satisfaction models differently. We investigated the extent to which frequency affects native speakers’ processing and interpretation of ‘voice (non)-alternating’ anticausative Greek verbs which differ in the availability or lack of voice alternation on the verb when it appears in intransitive structures. The accessibility of interpretations was measured with an online self-paced reading (SPR) task and an offline acceptability judgment (AJ) task addressed to 45 monolingual Greek-speaking adults. In order to investigate whether processing load is affected by statistical records in the parser, we compared empirical data with the frequency of the available readings that these verbs receive in formal and informal registers (ILSP, Web-Based Corpus). The online processing study indicated that the parser is sensitive to morphological cues ((N)ACT voice marking), while semantic factors such as animacy are integrated in subsequent stages of processing. A frequency effect was found in accordance with ‘coarse-grained’ models of sentence processing, while more ‘fine-grained’ models could not be validated with respect to frequency alone. The majority of acceptability judgements attributed to the verbs investigated correlated with the most frequent interpretations of verb forms in intransitive structures in corpora. Full article

Languages vary systematically in how semantic information is “packaged” in verbs and verb-related constructions. Mandarin Chinese contrasts typologically with English in its lexicalization of state change. Most Mandarin monomorphemic verbs are moot about or imply a state change, whereas many English monomorphemic verbs (e.g., kill, break) entail the fulfillment of a state change. Recent studies suggest that Mandarin monomorphemic verbs form a continuum in the strength of state-change implicature. State-change verbs have been found difficult for first language (L1) learners. This study reports two experiments that investigate the lexical semantic knowledge of Mandarin monomorphemic implied or moot state-change verbs by intermediate (N = 19, mean age 21) and advanced (N = 12, mean age 21) English-speaking second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese. The results reveal L2 learners’ general preference for the state-change interpretation for the monomorphemic verbs and their limited sensitivity to the nuanced strength of state-change implicature in the Mandarin verbs. Typological differences in the lexicalization of state change are argued to contribute to the difficulties in L2 learning of the lexical semantics in the semantic domain of state change in Mandarin. Full article

In individuals who know more than one language, the languages are always active to some degree. This has consequences for language processing, but bilinguals rarely make mistakes in language selection. A prevailing explanation is that bilingualism is supported by strong cognitive control abilities, developed through long-term practice with managing multiple languages and spilling over into more general executive functions. However, not all bilinguals are the same, and not all contexts for bilingualism provide the same support for control and regulation abilities. This paper reviews research on hearing sign–speech bimodal bilinguals who have a unique ability to use and comprehend their two languages at the same time. We discuss the role of this research in re-examining the role of cognitive control in bilingual language regulation, focusing on how results from bimodal bilingualism research relate to recent findings emphasizing the correlation of control abilities with a bilingual’s contexts of language use. Most bimodal bilingualism research has involved individuals in highly English-dominant language contexts. We offer a critical examination of how existing bimodal bilingualism findings have been interpreted, discuss the value of broadening the scope of this research and identify long-standing questions about bilingualism and L2 learning which might benefit from this perspective. Full article