This paper reports findings from an exploratory study on multilingual speakers conducted in Germany. Data were collected using a questionnaire instrument launched in 2021. To our knowledge, this is the first enquiry into multilinguals' own perception of their spoken languages in Germany. The core research questions addressed in this paper are (1)…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

We investigate the interrelations between pronunciation and writing skills in French as a foreign language produced by two groups of bilingual learners (German-Russian; German-Turkish) and a monolingually raised German control group (each n = 10). As an indicator of the learners' pronunciation skills, we refer to a perceptually relevant acoustic…

Writing, as a highly complex strategic literacy skill alongside reading, is an essential prerequisite for learning and determines a student's educational success. In diverse contexts, a student's linguistic repertoire may involve multiple languages, which may serve as mutual resources in his or her multilingual writing skill development. Drawing…

One of the notable behaviours of individuals during the teaching of foreign languages is the use of the first language as an integral part of the learning-teaching process. This situation can also negatively affect the learning of a foreign language. The aim of this study is to determine the reasons why secondary-school students in Kazakhstan feel…

Language plays a crucial role in remembering, storing, maintaining, accessing, and sharing of memories. This evidence comes from the disciplines of psychoanalysis (Javier et al., 1993; Schwaneberg, 2010), developmental psychology (Fivush, 2011; Nelson, 2004), and bilingual memory (Larsen et al., 2002; Marian & Neisser, 2000). Some of the most…

In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian-speaking adults, 8-year-old children, and bilingual Russian-speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults' eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and…

Prior research has extensively explored audiovisual speech perception and literacy skills in various linguistic contexts. Studies have shown that children's ability to integrate auditory and visual speech cues plays a crucial role in language acquisition and development (Erdener & Burnham, 2013; Lalonde & Werner, 2021). Furthermore,…

Multilinguals' feelings of difference when switching languages have been discussed extensively. However, this research area has mainly focused on multilinguals dominant in their first language (L1), examining the feelings they experience when using any language other than the L1 (LX). The present study offers a novel perspective on this topic and…

In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence (CLI) at developmental stages of third language (L3) acquisition of English by Russian--Norwegian children (N = 31). We tested seven linguistic properties within three linguistic modules (morphology, syntax and syntax-semantics). We compared the L3 learners to Norwegian (N = 90) and Russian…

The the article proves the crucial role of principles of comparative/contrastive teaching Russian. The author proves that Russian methodologists understand the need to take into consideration students' mother tongue when teaching Russian as a foreign language. The article contains general characteristics of Swahili and comparative analysis of…

Initial instruction emphasizing large grain units (i.e., words) showed distinct advantages over small grain instruction for English-speaking adults learning to read an artificial orthography (Brennan and Booth in Read Writ 28(7):917-938, 2015. 10.1007/s11145-015-9555-2). The current study extends this research by training 34 English-speaking…

In view of the ubiquitous increase in the use of C-tests, which are almost unanimously believed to measure general language proficiency, this study investigates whether the aspects of language proficiency tapped into by the C-test format are the same when the test is taken by a learner population other than that of foreign language learners.…