The goals of this article are to appraise second language acquisition's (SLA) disciplinary progress over the last 15 years and to reflect on transdisciplinary relevance as the field has completed 40 years of existence and moves forward into the 21st century. I first identify four trends that demonstrate vibrant disciplinary progress in SLA. I then…

This paper draws on two research activities to discuss the role of research at the Centre for Language Learning (CLL) at The University of the West Indies St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago. Established in 1997, the CLL introduced languages for all into this Caribbean higher education (HE) context. The CLL also introduced an expanded…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

The articles in this special issue provide a complex picture of acquisition in bilinguals in which the factors that contribute to patterns of performance in bilingual children's two languages are myriad and diverse. The processes and contours of development in bilingual children are influenced, not only by the quantity, quality, and contexts…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (-articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with…

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual…

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [??] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [?] tends to occur in syllable onset…

This study outlines a linguistic profile of two subgroups of Italian English circumstantial bilinguals - one dominant in English and the other dominant in Italian--by exploring for the first time their linguistic repertoire through the Gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009). The scale takes into account language…

The present paper investigates the relationship between objective ethnolinguistic vitality, individual networks of linguistic contacts (INLCs) and perceived vitality among German-speaking (N = 415) and Italian-speaking (N = 379) adolescents in South Tyrol, Italy. Supporting our hypothesis, we found that INLC has a greater effect on perceived…

To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

This book, written for both seasoned and novice researchers, presents a theory of what is called Basic and Higher Language Cognition (BLC and HLC), a theory aimed at making some fundamental issues concerning first and second language learning and bilingualism (more) empirical. The first part of the book provides background for and explication of…

The teaching and learning of Modern Hebrew outside of Israel is essential to Jewish education and identity. One of the most contested issues in Modern Hebrew pedagogy is the use of code-switching between Modern Hebrew and learners' first language. Moreover, this is one of the longest running disputes in the broader field of second language…

Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…

Pieter Muysken's keynote paper, "Language contact outcomes as a result of bilingual optimization strategies", undertakes an ambitious project to theoretically unify different empirical outcomes of language contact, for instance, SLA, pidgins and Creoles, and code-switching. Muysken has dedicated a life-time to researching, rather…