Third language (L3) lexical acquisition is still underexplored. In this article I overview theoretical and empirical evidence on L3 lexical acquisition and the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in learning L3 words. I explain the mechanism of CLI as resulting from language co-activation in the multilingual learner's/user's mind.…

With the increasing consensus that a single effect of bilingualism is unlikely, some scholars shift their focus to elements that may exert an influence on the bilingual brain. One such element that has been garnering attention lately concerns the role of L1-L2 typological distance. In this conceptual analysis, I make the case that the foundations…

Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

This article is a response to commentaries on the article, "Microvariation in Multilingual Situations: The Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition" (EJ1300541). This response is divided into sections focusing on the following issues: (1) full transfer and the notion of copying; (2) the definition of linguistic proximity; (3) some…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the first language, second language or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult third language (L3) acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird's eye view of the data tells us regarding…

This commentary discusses Westergaard's (2021) keynote article, which presents a comprehensive model of first language (L1), second language (L2), and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary presents evidence from a previous study of L3 learners that provides support for Westergaard's property-by-property transfer proposal. The commentary…

This paper provides an introduction to Lakurumau, a previously undescribed and undocumented Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The first part of the paper is a guide to the Lakurumau documentation corpus, deposited in the ELAR archive. The participants and the content of the deposit, the technology used for recording, and the ethical protocols…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

It is two decades since Master (1997) published a framework for second language (L2) article pedagogy, based on several years of research into the acquisition of the English article system. Among his recommendations were a focus on intermediate level learners and a simplification of the rules presented to language learners. Since then, substantial…

When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

A number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word…

We present a proof-of-concept study that sketches the use of compression algorithms to assess Kolmogorov complexity, which is a text-based, quantitative, holistic, and global measure of structural surface redundancy. Kolmogorov complexity has been used to explore cross-linguistic complexity variation in linguistic typology research, but we are the…

Many people speak more than two languages. How do languages acquired earlier affect the learnability of additional languages? We show that linguistic distances between speakers' first (L1) and second (L2) languages and their third (L3) language play a role. Larger distances from the L1 to the L3 and from the L2 to the L3 correlate with lower…

Producing a sensible utterance requires speakers to select conceptual content, lexical items, and syntactic structures almost instantaneously during speech planning. Each language offers its speakers flexibility in the selection of lexical and syntactic options to talk about the same scenarios involving movement. Languages also vary typologically…