This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as "infantia." The Latin word "infantia," which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's works on the untranslatables,…

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

The aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2-L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a semantic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2-L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been…

In this study we explored factors that determine the knowledge of L2 words with orthographic neighbours in L1 (cognates and false cognates). We asked 150 Polish learners of English to translate 105 English non-cognate words, cognates, and false-cognates into Polish, and to assess the confidence of each translation. Confidence ratings allows us to…

Memory-based language processing (MBLP) is an approach to language processing based on exemplar storage during learning and analogical reasoning during processing. From a cognitive perspective, the approach is attractive as a model for human language processing because it does not make any assumptions about the way abstractions are shaped, nor any…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

The experiment investigated the benefit to second language (L2) sentence comprehension of priming word meanings with brief visual exposure to first language (L1) translation equivalents. Native English speakers learning Mandarin evaluated the validity of aurally presented Mandarin sentences. For selected words in half of the sentences there was…

Whether words are or are not activated within the lexicon of the nonused language is an important question for accounts of bilingual word production. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results, either because alternative accounts could be proposed for their findings or because activation could have been artificially induced by the…

Many offline studies on third language acquisition suggest strong connections between speakers' L3 and L2 rather than between their L3 and L1, especially if the foreign languages are typologically related (Cenoz, Hufeisen, & Jessner, 2001; Singleton, 2001). However, a recent online study investigating trilingual processing did not provide evidence…

The present study investigates the influence of first language (L1) lexicalization patterns on the processing of second language (L2) words in sentential contexts by advanced German learners of English. The focus was on cases where a polysemous word in the L1 is realized by independent words in the L2, e.g. German "Blase" realized by English…

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more…

Essays in applied linguistics presented in this annual review include: "Learner Autonomy: Some Steps in the Evolution of Theory and Practice" (David Little); "An Investigation of the Mental Lexicon of Second Language Learners" (Elizabeth O'Gorman); "Strategies for Identifying Terms in Specialised Texts" (Jennifer Pearson); "Inferencing and the…