Languages, Volume 6, Issue 3

This study examines the effect of adjective type on distribution and interpretation of Spanish adjectives in native Polish classroom learners of Spanish. A native Spanish group (n = 16), an advanced Spanish learner group (n = 24), and an intermediate...

This study focuses on the address paradigm in the Spanish spoken in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a Latin American variety which presents speakers with three options—one polite (usted), and two familiar (pan-Hispanic tú and regional vos). Recen...

This study explores learners’ online peer review practices during a four-week second language writing project. The project was developed in a multi-section Spanish writing course at the college level. The study investigates how college Spanish learne...

Research has assessed how language use differences between bilinguals (e.g., whether two languages are used approximately equally often or not) influence language processing. However, first (L1) and second (L2) language use might also differ within b...

This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis has the status of both “not proven” and unfalsified. The article an...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused educational institutions across the world to face a new reality: when teachers and students do not share the same physical space (fractured ecologies), drastic changes in the everyday procedures and routines of teaching b...

The morphology of the pronominal suffixes in dialectal Arabic are of particular interest for scholars of the history of Arabic for two main reasons. First, multiple dialects attest suffixes that, from a comparative perspective, apparently retain fina...

The Baggara Belt constitutes the southernmost periphery of the Arabic-speaking world. It stretches over 2500 km from Nigeria to Sudan and it is largely inhabited by Arab semi-nomadic cattle herders. Despite its common sociohistorical background, the...

This paper aims to present some preliminary results of the linguistic analysis of the dialect of the Wilāya of Mahdia on which few studies exist, focused mainly on phonology. My analysis, here extended to the morpho-syntactic level, is based on a cor...

Our study aims to determine whether formal similarity between two languages (operationalized via the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis) allows adult L2 learners of French (Spanish native speakers; NSs) to straightforwardly acquire third-person singular a...

This piece explores the need to provide better training to graduate student instructors by first conducting a needs analysis of current graduate students and recent graduate students regarding their conceptualizations of writing, multiliteracies, and...

Attempts to classify spoken Arabic dialects based on distinct reflexes of consonant phonemes are known to employ a mixture of parameters, which often conflate linguistic and non-linguistic facts. This article advances an alternative, theory-informed...

In late-insertion, realizational models of morphology such as Distributed Morphology (DM), the insertion of Vocabulary Items (VIs) is conditioned by cyclic operations in the syntax. This paper explores whether an isomorphic relationship can be establ...

In spite of the growing integration of computer-mediated collaborative writing and multimodal composition in second language (L2) classrooms, research on collaborative multimodal writing, as an innovative writing pedagogy, is still underway and large...

Shina is an endangered Indo-Aryan (Dardic) language spoken in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Shina’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast across five places of articulation. A wide range of acoustic...

There is no doubt that the Internet, where English is ubiquitous, has revolutionized our way of life. Socially, it has opened frontiers to such an extent that nowadays human beings can be permanently connected, no matter the distance between them, in...

The study reports on adults’ linguistic use of Nahuatl in the bilingual community of Santiago Tlaxco, Mexico. Using a survey approach, adults were asked to indicate their language choices (i.e., Spanish, Nahuatl or both languages) when interacting wi...

Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia) exhibit a complex predicate construction in which a class of preverbs introduces a single argument that is not shared by the argument structure of the inflecting verb, nor is there necessar...

This paper examines language attitudes of South Tyroleans towards German varieties used in educational institutions by means of a questionnaire survey with 55 university students. The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into subjects’ attitude...

Language maintenance efforts aim to bolster attitudes towards endangered languages by providing them with a standard variety as a means to raise their status and prestige. However, the introduced variety can vary in its degrees of standardisation. Th...

This study investigates young Korean children’s attitudes toward three English varieties: American English (AmE), Singapore English (SiE), and Korean English (KoE). A total of 42 Korean children participated in this study. For data analysis purposes,...

Research has shown that melody not only plays a crucial role in music but also in language acquisition processes. Evidence has been provided that melody helps in retrieving, remembering, and memorizing new language material, while relatively little i...

Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual...

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and pre...

In this article I explore how typological approaches can be used to construct novel classification schemes for Arabic dialects, taking the example of definiteness as a case study. Definiteness in Arabic has traditionally been envisioned as an essenti...

The following study investigated a rare case of adult immersion in a second language context without prior exposure to the language. It aimed to investigate whether Length of Residence (LoR) acts as a strong index of L2 speech performance when couple...

Are semantic classes of verbs genuine or do they merely mask idiosyncrasies of frequent verbs? Here, we examine the interplay between semantic classes and frequent verb-form combinations, providing new evidence from variation patterns in spontaneous...

Literacy is an essential tool for functioning in a modern society and, as such, it is often taken for granted when developing second language learning curricula for people who need to learn another language. However, almost 750 million people around...

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language...

It is widely agreed that prosodic constituents should mirror syntactic constituents (unless high-ranking prosodic constraints interfere). Because recursion is a feature of syntactic representations, one expects recursion in prosodic representations a...

The Arabic dialectology literature repeatedly asserts the existence of a macro-level classificatory relationship binding the Arabic speech varieties of the combined Egypto-Sudanic area. This proposal, though oft-encountered, has not previously been f...

This article discussed language use and language maintenance among the Italian-Bangladeshi community in London, considering in particular the effects of onward migration on the reorganisation of their linguistic repertoire. Drawing on focus groups an...

Research on child heritage speakers (HSs) has shown successful language acquisition, comparable to monolinguals, whereas research on adult HSs often claims incomplete acquisition. This seems to be an evident contradiction in the current state of rese...

Apocope (deletion of word-final vowels) and word-final vowel reduction are hallmarks of southern Italian varieties. To investigate whether heritage speakers reproduce the complex variable patterns of these processes, we analyze spontaneous speech of...

In this work, we intend to investigate one fundamental aspect of language contact by comparing the distribution of subjects in German, Northern Italian dialects and Cimbrian. Here, we show that purely syntactic order phenomena are more prone to conve...

Background: The present study aims to investigate the effect of the first language (L1) orthography on the perception of the second language (L2) vowel contrasts and whether orthographic effects occur at the sublexical level. Methods: Fourteen adult...

This paper presents an analysis of poems, digital art, and accompanying analytical essays authored by four college students taking an advanced Spanish as heritage language. This paper highlights the ways in which creative writing, along with digital...

Language issues related to identity negotiation in minoritised language contexts, including those related to the category of “new speakers”, have often been studied in relation to local language dichotomies and national populations. This paper will e...

Recent research has underlined the benefits of peer assessment (PA) as it helps learners write high-quality essays and increases their confidence as writers. In terms of this intervention study, 200 Greek Cypriot EFL learners’ essays (pre- and post-t...

The present study sought to examine the effect of dual language activation on L1 speech in late English–Austrian German sequential bilinguals, and to identify relevant predictor variables. To this end, we compared the English speech patterns of adult...

Research on grammatical variation and change has traditionally been based on diachronic and synchronic corpus analysis, but the growing importance of experimental approaches to the study of language has led many researchers to combine corpus study wi...

Fifty-six Portuguese speakers born and raised in Brazil produced Portuguese words beginning in one of four plosives, /p b k ɡ/. Twenty-eight of them were monolinguals (controls), and the rest were learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The...

Kunbarlang shows considerable variation in the word order patterns of nominal expressions. This paper investigates these patterns, concentrating on the distribution of noun markers (articles) and on attributive modification. Based on examination of s...