Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are…

Whereas Standard Dutch only distinguishes between two adnominal grammatical genders, substandard varieties of Belgian Dutch distinguish between three such genders. German, too, distinguishes between three genders. Nevertheless, when assigning gender to German nouns with Dutch cognates, speakers of Belgian Dutch are strongly influenced by Standard…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of word internal morphological form variation on adult first language (L1) (n = 20) incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were given a 37,611-token English novel containing pseudo words, placed throughout the text by the novelist. Two…

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…

Past studies in language teaching have addressed the issue of whether the benefits of formal instruction outweigh those of naturalistic instruction, or vice versa. This study examined 1 aspect of naturalistic instruction closely: the conversation partnership. There were 3 conversation partnerships (English/Mandarin, English/Arabic, and…