This monograph describes the overall language situation in Luxembourg, a highly multilingual country in Western Europe, from a language policy and planning perspective. The first part discusses the social and historical contexts, including major societal changes and uncertainties about the future, which are bound up with Europeanisation and the…

Whereas most research in SLA assumes the relationship between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) to be unidirectional, this study investigates the possibility of a bidirectional relationship. We examine the domain of manner of motion, in which monolingual Japanese and English speakers differ both in speech and gesture. Parallel…

Two experiments in which participants named pictured objects with difficult or easier names, and a reanalysis and review of published data, reveal that problematic measures used in previous studies obscured the implications of group differences in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) rates. In Experiment 1, increased age led to more TOTs for difficult but not…

Two studies are reported that assess differences associated with aging and bilingualism in an executive control task. Previous work has suggested that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in nonlinguistic tasks involving executive control; the major purpose of the present article is to ascertain which aspects of control are sensitive…

This study provides preliminary indications of the performance of typically developing children with English as an additional language (EAL) on the British Picture Vocabulary Scales II [BPVS II]. One-hundred and sixty-five children aged four to nine years took part in the study, 69 monolingual English speakers and 96 with EAL. The results indicate…

The acquisition of new skills over a life span is a remarkable human ability. This ability, however, is constrained by age of acquisition (AoA); that is, the age at which learning occurs significantly affects the outcome. This is most clearly reflected in domains such as language, music, and athletics. This article provides a perspective on the…

This article describes oral language and early literacy skills in Spanish and English for a sample of 319 bilingual children in Massachusetts and Maryland (ECS) and a comparison group of 144 monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Puerto Rico (PRC). Children were assessed as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs. Data collection…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: it primarily intended to incorporate some insights into the newly-explored field of L3A: secondly, it aimed to highlight the significance of translation as a valid language activity in exploring the native language influence on non-native language acquisition process. To this end, it investigated the…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

The political discourse of Deaf ethnolinguistic identity has empowered Deaf people in recent decades to deconstruct a pathological model of deafness and the deficit pedagogy that centres on acquisition of speech and social assimilation. The engagement of Deaf community members in consultation and employment in the New Zealand (NZ) education system…

Twenty-six monolingual and 46 bilingual college students were assigned to 2 groups on the basis of their performance on a complex relational task, an empirical model of instructional control (O'Hora, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2004). The subjects were then exposed to the vocabulary, arithmetic, and digit-symbol encoding subtests of the…

Background: In recent research, verbal working memory has been proposed as a primary area of deficit for children with language impairment (LI), and therefore a source of more sensitive assessment measures. In addition, research on non-linguistic tasks has suggested that children with LI may have deficits that extend beyond the linguistic domain.…

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status…

This study investigates how/whether the emergence and function of Turkish Tense Aspect Modality (TAM) markers that are used in narratives by children from 3 to 9 plus 13-year-olds show differences relative to the age of the narrator both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data were collected, by using Mayer's (1969) wordless picture book…

Premature discontinuation rates among second language students in New Zealand are higher than for most other subjects in secondary schools, although this phenomenon has not given rise to a great deal of debate within the NZ language teaching community. In a recent study into premature discontinuation in Christchurch, NZ, the most frequently cited…