Languages, Volume 6, Issue 1

In Austria, Turkish immigrants have long suffered from the stigma of being the uneducated and unintegrated guestworker, often portrayed as marginalised and as living in parallel societies. However, second-generation Turks who were born and/or raised...

Bilingual children often experience difficulties with inflectional morphology. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how regularity of inflection in combination with verbal short-term and working memory (VSTM, VWM) influences bilingua...

In this article, an interdisciplinary lens is applied to French migrants’ reflections on their everyday language practices, investigating how embodied and embedded language, such as accent and London-French translanguaging, serve as both in-group and...

This study describes the validation of a reading assessment developed for speakers of Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language spoken in Scotland. The test is designed to investigate the areas of reading for understanding, reading errors and reading s...

Bilinguals who have acquired both of their languages simultaneously since birth or have learned their first language (L1) and their second language (L2) sequentially, as children or as adults, are able to produce and perceive two different sound syst...

The inclusion of European minority languages in public spaces such as education, administration and the media has led to the emergence of a new profile of speakers, “new speakers”, who typically acquire a minority language through education, but vary...

This paper investigates the modal and non-modal uses and readings of the purposive suffix in the Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan) language Pintupi-Luritja. It is shown that the suffix is associated with a range of root-modal readings, with some variabil...

This paper intends to provide some speculative remarks on how consistency and continuity in language use practices within and across contexts inform heritage language acquisition outcomes. We intend “consistency” as maintenance of similar patterns of...

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were...

Even though the European Union has long promoted multilingualism, it has proven difficult to achieve widespread multilingual language competence beyond English through formal education in Europe. In Sweden, high dropout rates have been recorded in se...

The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the descript...

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whe...

The rising population of heritage speakers (HS) in university courses in the US has increased the need for instructors who understand the linguistic, social, and cultural profiles of their students. Recent research has discussed the need for speciali...

This study tests whether Australian English (AusE) and European Spanish (ES) listeners differ in their categorisation and discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. In particular, we investigate two theoretically relevant measures of vowel c...

Studies have shown that “framing bias,” a phenomenon in which two different presentations of the same decision-making problem provoke different answers, is reduced in a foreign language (the Foreign Language effect, FLe). Three explanations have emer...

In this paper, we intend to describe and discuss the grammatical status of the V1-V2 (Cy/vy) constructions found in Mbya Guarani which can express simultaneous events, among other meanings, and which involve a single clause. We suggest here that this...

This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a lan...

The Afro-Hispanic creole, Palenquero, has been spoken (together with Spanish) in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, for centuries. Until recently, Palenquero was endangered due to prejudice, but language revitalization efforts are unde...

We compare speech production and find morphosyntactic change among children and adolescents speaking two closely related varieties of Quechua in Cuzco, Peru, and Chuquisaca, Bolivia. Quechua languages traditionally employ Object-Verb (OV) word order...

Spanish speakers constitute the largest heritage language community in the US. The state of Florida is unusual in that, on one hand, it has one of the highest foreign-born resident rates in the country, most of whom originate from Latin America—but o...

Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age a...

Despite the prevalence of mixed language programs across the United States, their impact on the unique socio-affective needs of heritage language (HL) students has not been researched sufficiently. Therefore, the present study examines HL learners’ c...

This study explores the contribution of nonverbal working memory and processing speed on bilingual children’s morphosyntactic knowledge, after controlling for language exposure. Participants include 307 Spanish–English bilinguals in Kindergarten, sec...

There is consensus that languages possess several grammatical variants satisfying the same conversational function. Nevertheless, it is a matter of debate which principles guide the adult speaker’s choice and the child’s acquisition order of these va...

The aim of this article is to discuss the role of input characteristics in the development of French verb morphology. From a usage-based perspective, several cognitive and linguistic factors contribute to the ease or difficulty of processing input in...

The Irish language is an indigenous minority language undergoing accelerated convergence with English against a backdrop of declining intergenerational transmission, universal bilingualism, and exposure to large numbers of L2 speakers. Recent studies...

Adult L2 acquisition has often been framed within research on the Critical Period Hypothesis, and the age factor is one of the most researched topics of SLA. However, several researchers suggest that while age is the most important factor for differe...

Extensive research has shown that second language (L2) learners find it difficult to apply grammatical knowledge during real-time processing, especially when differences exist between the first (L1) and L2. The current study examines the extent to wh...

Within sociolinguistic research on small languages like Low German, differentiation into new and native speakers has become established. The relationship between the two different groups of speakers is sometimes conceptualized as an insurmountable “g...

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of...

Russian and Turkish are the most frequently spoken and intensively investigated heritage languages in Germany, but contrastive research on their development in early childhood is still missing. This longitudinal study compares the trajectories of exp...

There are two main approaches to change of state verbs. One adopts an approach in terms of a total change (becomeP, for base predicate P), i.e., a change from not being in the extension of the base predicate to being in it. The other adopts an approa...

The overall aim of the present study is to achieve a better understanding of young instructed Swedish learners’ vocabulary knowledge in L3 French, by examining various aspects of vocabulary depth. Previous research has shown that this learner group’s...

Usage-based approaches suggest that children gradually build abstract syntactic patterns, called constructions, through processes of abstraction and schematization from the input they receive. Bilingual children have the challenge of learning two set...

This study investigates the effects of task-essential training on offline and online processing of verbal morphology and explores how working memory (WM) modulates the effects of training. We compare a no-training control group to two training groups...

The editorial team greatly appreciates the reviewers who have dedicated a considerable amount of time and expertise to the journal’s rigorous editorial process over the past 12 months, regardless of whether the papers have been finally publishe...

Prior studies have examined the association between modifying adjective placement and interpretation in second language (L2) Spanish. These studies show evidence of convergence with native speaker’s intuitions, which is interpreted as restructu...

This article investigates the effects that Mindful Conceptual Engagement (MCE) had on the teaching of the Spanish subjunctive on second (L2) and heritage language learners (HL) of Spanish. A total of 26 university-level undergraduate students partici...

The current study investigated the type of strategies that English–French bilingual adults utilize when reading in their dominant and non-dominant languages and which of these strategies are associated with reading comprehension success. Thirty...

Research on code-switching was the province of specialists in linguistics alone in the latter part of the twentieth century and is still a valuable source of insights into the human language faculty [...]

This study deals with the expression of additive linking in L2 French by adult German learners with two proficiency levels (advanced vs. intermediate). We examine whether crosslinguistic influences are observed in three domains: the frequency and typ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether subtitles can facilitate language processing in English as a second language (L2) and, if so, which subtitles would be more beneficial for hard-of-hearing students with Norwegian as their first lan...

This exploratory article describes (1) the self-reported instructional practices of a group of 103 Kindergarten to Grade 12 French-as-a-second-language (FSL) teachers from school boards across Ontario, Canada before and after intensive and extensive...

This study aims to advance the understanding of the impact of the discursive context in the form-function mappings of aller + V forms by native speakers (NSs) and learners of French (NNSs), and to further knowledge about the developmental patterns of...

This study investigated how the attitudes and expectations of heritage languages (HL) courses differ between Spanish and Korean. Spanish and Korean are two of the biggest heritage languages (HLs) taught across American universities, but represent dif...

The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of taking into account variations in monolingual grammars before discussing majority language influence as a possible source of heritage speakers’ divergent grammars. In this study, we exami...

The purpose of the current study was to explore if and how additional-language learners may show changes in phraseological patterns over the course of a stay in a target-language environment. In particular, we focused on noun+adjective combinations p...

Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education: Theory, Research, and Practice is a compendium of the six modules that were the result of the third phase of the EU-Speak Project, European Speakers of Other Languages: Teaching Adult Migrants...

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migr...

Previous studies attest that some early bilinguals produce the sounds of their languages in a manner that is characterized as “compromise” with regard to monolingual speakers. The present study uses meta-analytic techniques and coronal st...