Previous and current research identify Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) as a possible cause of the positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and Third Language Acquisition (TLA). Although it has been acknowledged that MLA is strongly affected by literacy and grammar-related activities, only a few studies have focused on the context…

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the…

The present study investigates the relationship between L2 metalinguistic knowledge and L2 achievement among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners studying at a large scale Turkish university. Metalinguistic knowledge refers to the ability to correct a grammatically incorrect structure in English and explain why it is incorrect, and…

This study examined the contributions of morphological awareness (MA) to second language (L2) word meaning inferencing in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese (N = 50). Three research questions were posed: Are L2 learners sensitive to the morphological structure of unknown multi-character words? Does first language (L1) MA contribute to L2…

According to the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (e.g., Tsimpli & Sorace 2006; Sorace 2011), external interfaces are more challenging for L2 learners than internal interfaces. It is not clear, however, if linguistic phenomena associated with external interfaces are necessarily problematic and if internal interfaces are necessarily unproblematic. In…

The Test of Language Competence-Expanded Edition (TLC-E) was administered to children and adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Relative to controls, those with ASD were less competent on a range of TLC-E tasks. No differences were found for either child or adult ASD groups on any of the TLC-E measures when re-classified as…

This study examines well-compensated adults with dyslexia to see if they experience more problems with pragmatic awareness than the normal population. Social interaction requires an individual to process language at speed by using working memory efficiently, in order to understand the intended, rather than literal, meaning between speaker and…

Investigated the psychological factors that affect access to metalinguistic knowledge in second language (L2) production. A verbalization task was used to assess the metalinguistic knowledge about target uses and a judgment test was administered to determine relative prototypicality of these uses of 64 adult Chinese learners of English.…

Compared grammaticality judgment (GJ) test data with dehydrated sentence test data, collecting data about verb movement from three levels of adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners. The GJs of L2 learners were consistent, suggesting that a relationship exists between a standard GJ test and a dehydrated sentence test and noting that GJ data are…