Search Results (31)

In an increasingly globalized world, learning foreign languages (FLs) is essential, particularly in education. Multilingualism is critical due to the multicultural and interconnected nature of societies, yet early third language acquisition (TLA) is not widely adopted in schools. This study investigates how the simultaneous learning of Spanish first language (L1), a second language (L2), and a third language (L3) impacts oral language (OL) development in L1 and whether prior L2 knowledge aids L3 acquisition. The study involved bilingual (L1 + L2) and trilingual (L1 + L2 + L3) learners. Data were collected using the Navarre Oral Language Test-Revised, which evaluates phonological, morphological–syntactic, lexical–semantic, and pragmatic competencies in oral communication. Findings revealed that trilingual learners showed better OL development in L1 compared to bilingual learners. Additionally, prior L2 knowledge facilitated L3 learning, highlighting the benefits of early trilingual education. The study demonstrates that early trilingual learning positively impacts OL development in L1. These results contribute significantly to research on TLA and the advancement of multilingual education. Full article

LexTALE has emerged as a popular measure of language proficiency in research studies. While it has been widely validated for L2 learners across multiple languages, its applicability to heritage language learners (HLLs)—who often show distinct language development from L2ers—has not been established. Here, we evaluate the Spanish version of LexTALE (LexTALE-Esp) as a predictor of writing proficiency among college-aged HLLs in the United States. We show that LexTALE-Esp scores significantly correlate with ACTFL-rated functional writing levels and outperform self-assessment as a predictor of proficiency. Our results suggest that, despite concerns about HLLs’ limited experience with written texts in the heritage language, vocabulary-based tasks capture core aspects of written language ability. These findings indicate that vocabulary-based tests like LexTALE-Esp capture proficiency-relevant lexical knowledge across speaker profiles and may tap into dimensions of both core and extended language competence. Full article

Sociophonetic competence—a component of sociolinguistic and, thus, communicative competence—has been explored in both learner production and perception. Still, little is known about the relationship between learners’ ability to account for sociophonetic variability in the input and their likelihood to produce such variation in output. The present study explores 21 learners’ preference for a specific sociophonetic variant on an aural preference task and the same learners’ patterns of production of the variant in semi-spontaneous speech. The sociolinguistic variable considered is Spanish intervocalic /d/, variably realized as approximant [ð] or deleted based on numerous (extra)linguistic factors, including the speaker’s gender, the vowel that precedes /d/, and the grammatical category and lexical frequency of the word containing /d/. Results reveal that preference for and production of a deleted variant increased with learner proficiency. Moreover, regardless of proficiency, learners generally selected deleted /d/ more than they produced it, suggesting that sociophonetic awareness precedes reliable production. Learners’ production of a deleted variant was influenced by the preceding vowel, the grammatical category of the word containing /d/, and the word’s lexical frequency, and sensitivity to these predictors was especially observed as proficiency increased. Learners produced the deleted variant more after /o/, in adjectives and nouns, and in frequent words. Full article

Background/Objectives: Narration is a sensitive tool for the assessment of language in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) since mild language deficits beyond the sentential level are not always noticeable through the administration of standardized language tests targeting the lexical or sentential level. This study investigated the narrative ability of monolingual Greek-speaking HF-ASD children in comparison to that of their typically developing (TD) peers and explored the associations between narrative variables, ADHD symptomatology, and memory skills in the participants on the autistic spectrum. Methods: The participants were 39 children aged 7 to 12 years, 19 with HF-ASD and 20 age-matched, vocabulary-matched, and cognitively matched TD peers. Results: The two groups were similar in most microstructural and macrostructural variables but differed significantly in syntactic complexity (p = 0.024; d = 0.754) and subordination (p < 0.001; d = −1.576) indices, implying that the HF-ASD group presented syntactic delay in comparison to their TD peers. The HF-ASD participants showed significantly higher heterogeneity in the amount of information generated for the story’s main character (p = 0.004; d = −0.093) in comparison to their TD peers. Significant associations were observed between verbal and visual memory, complex syntactic structures, and Theory of Mind-related internal state terms. ADHD symptomatology was negatively correlated with the generation of simple and coordinated clauses. Finally, complex syntax and delayed vSTM were correlated with retelling total scores, indicating that language ability and verbal memory compensate for narrative competence in HF-ASD children. Conclusions: The findings highlight the impact that language skills, memory ability, and ADHD symptomatology have on narrative competence in children with HF-ASD, as well as the importance of narrative use for assessing the language skills in populations with mild language impairment. Full article

Introduction: The objective of the current study was two-fold. First, it aimed to estimate receptive vocabulary and expressive syntax skills in L2 Italian among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children of migrant single-mother families with very low socioeconomic status (SES). This objective was achieved by matching the participants’ performance with normative data. Secondly, this study aimed to identify which individual and language exposure factors contributed to learning L2 vocabulary and syntax. Methods: Twenty-four early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children (age range = 5.10–12.4 years) and their mothers were enrolled. Mothers answered questions about linguistic biography and demographic information. Children completed Lexical Comprehension, Sentence Repetition, and Non-Word Repetition tasks from the Language Assessment Battery for 4–12-year-olds to, respectively, assess receptive vocabulary, expressive syntax, and phonological processing. Moreover, non-verbal intellectual functioning was evaluated by the Raven’s Test. Results/Discussion: Compared to normative data, 20 children showed lower receptive vocabulary abilities (<−1.5 SD), 24 lower expressive syntax skills (−2DS), and 7 children lower phonological processing (<−1.5 DS). Moreover, L2 phonological processing and the length of L2 exposure in an educational context positively predicted L2 receptive vocabulary as well as L2 expressive syntax skills. To date, performance in L2 among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children from migrant households and very low SES remains underexplored. Future efforts need to be directed towards the understanding of factors that impact oral competence in L2, considering that these children will also be exposed to written L2 in the school context. Full article

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are impaired in word production when the word has to be selected among competing alternatives requiring higher attentional resources. In PD, word selection processes are correlated with the structural integrity of the inferior frontal gyrus, which is critical for response selection, and the uncinate fasciculus, which is necessary for processing lexical information. In early PD, we investigated the role of the main cognitive large-scale networks, namely the salience network (SN), the central executive networks (CENs), and the default mode network (DMN), in word selection. Eighteen PD patients and sixteen healthy controls were required to derive nouns from verbs or generate verbs from nouns. Participants also underwent a resting-state functional MRI. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined using independent component analysis. Functional seeds for the SN, CENs, and DMN were defined as spheres, centered at the local activation maximum. Correlations were calculated between the FC of each functional seed and word production. A significant association between SN connectivity and task performance and, with less evidence, between CEN connectivity and the task requiring selection among a larger number of competitors, emerged in the PD group. These findings suggest the involvement of the SN and CEN in word selection in early PD, supporting the hypothesis of impaired executive control. Full article

Previous studies suggest that lexical competence is an important factor that influences reading skills and spelling accuracy in primary school children. Understanding the relationship between these skills will provide valuable insights to improve reading and writing enhancement and intervention strategies. The aim of this pre-post longitudinal study is to examine the effectiveness of an enhancement program, in which there are activities proposed through a narrative and metacognitive methodology, designed to develop the cognitive processes of lexical acquisition and its effects on reading and writing ability. A total of 74 primary school children (M-age = 7.04 years) participated in the research. They were divided into groups: experimental, which carried out the enhancement, and control groups, which carried out the typical school program. The results show that children who carried out the enhancement obtained higher scores in reading skills, specifically in reading accuracy and text comprehension and spelling accuracy, in comparison with their peers in the control group. These results suggest that strengthening the lexical semantic pathway, as theorized by Coltheart’s two-way model, can lead to improved reading comprehension and diminished reading errors and spelling inaccuracies. Full article

Bilingual teaching has experienced rapid growth in the Spanish educational panorama and numerous university programmes have emerged with the aim of training future CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teachers. However, there is little research assessing the level of linguistic competence in Spanish and foreign languages of future teachers, especially those who are studying for a bilingual degree. Although this work is part of a broader project that analyses bilingual lexical competence in subjects related to the Social Sciences and Experimental Sciences, we focus on the analysis of lexical availability of content related to the teaching of science. The sample consisted of 46 students of the Degree in Primary Education at the University of Extremadura. Using a lexical availability test, lexical production in Spanish and English is analysed and compared to determine whether the fact of studying in English affects the acquisition and consolidation of lexical knowledge in Spanish. The results show that there are no significant differences in lexical production between Spanish and English. In addition to the quantitative data, results from the qualitative analysis are presented, analysing the most available words and the organisation of the lexicon in both languages. Full article

Analysing writing development as a function of foreign language competence is important in secondary school children because the developmental patterns are strongest at a young age when successful interventions are needed. Although a number of researchers have explored the degree to which specific textual characteristics in EFL students’ essays are associated with high and low ratings by teachers, the extent to which such characteristics are associated with rater-mediated assessment under standard exam conditions remains relatively unexplored. Motivated by the above void in pertinent literature, the overall aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between specific discourse features present in the writing scripts of EFL learners sitting for the British Council’s APTIS for TEENS exam and the assigned scores during operational scoring by specially trained raters. A total of 800 international EFL students aged 13 to 15 years old took part in the study, and 800 scored written essays on the same task prompt of the pertinent test produced under standard exam conditions were analysed. The results showed statistically significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) between the linguistic features identified in the essays produced by young EFL learners at different levels of language competence. The main text features that were repeatedly found to make a significant contribution to distinguishing scores assigned to texts both within and across levels were word frequency, word abstractness, lexical diversity, lexical and semantic overlap, all of which could be used to obtain a numerical cut-off point between proficiency levels. These findings support the notion that progress in L2 writing is primarily associated with producing more elaborate texts with more sophisticated words, more complex sentence structure and fewer cohesive features as a function of increased language competence. The findings of the study could provide practical guidance to EFL teachers, material developers and test designers as to the kind of linguistic strategies young EFL learners develop as a function of their level of language competence and suggestions to consider when designing EFL classroom curricula, writing skills textbooks and exam papers on written production. Full article

The purpose of this study was to investigate attrition effects in a group of L1-Greek–L2-English speakers and to explore their views on attrition and their feelings about their own use of both languages. The first part (n = 32) was a psycholinguistic study measuring semantic and formal verbal fluency which was part of a broader project. The second part (n = 14) was a sociolinguistic study of semi-structured interviews aiming to gain insights into participants’ lived experiences of attrition. In verbal fluency, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in the number of correct responses in both semantic and formal fluency. The analysis of the interview transcripts suggested that attriters experience attrition negatively, as a loss of a competence they once had, with two types of negative experiences emerging more prominently: (a) the realisation that they have difficulties with lexical retrieval and (b) stigmatising and judgemental comments by (non)-attriters. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this study on attriters can give us unique insights into their lived experience of attrition. Full article

New-borns are capable of recognising and producing sounds as they become phonologically competent. Following this, infants develop a system for connecting these sounds, which helps them become increasingly lexically competent over time. Their knowledge of these words grows as they develop, using words to form phrases, turning them into sentences, and ultimately becoming syntactically competent. By making sense of these linguistic elements, these three competencies are enhanced, and this is how infants become semantically competent. As infants continue to develop linguistic and non-linguistic communication behaviours, this miraculous language development becomes even more complex, enabling them to perfect their linguistic abilities while being pragmatically competent. In this study, a scientometric approach was used to examine past, present, and future trends in pragmatic language development (PLD). A total of 6455 documents were analysed from the Scopus, WOS, and Lens databases between 1950 and 2022. The analysis involved the visualisation and tabulation of eight bibliometric and eight scientometric indicators using CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18 software for data analysis. In this study, we highlight the major patterns and topics directing the research on PLD between 1950 and 2022. The themes and topics included (1) analysing PLD as a social behaviour through the lens of executive functions; (2) studying PLD as a social behaviour based on social understanding; (3) examining PLD as a social behaviour associated with autism spectrum disorder; (4) developing an understanding of PLD in academic settings through the examination of executive functions; (5) identifying pragmatic competence versus communicative competence as a social behaviour; (6) analysing pragmatic language skills in aphasic patients via epistemic stances (i.e., attitudes towards knowledge in interaction); (7) investigating PLD as a behavioural problem in the context of a foreign language; (8) assessing PLD as a behavioural problem in individuals with autism spectrum disorder; (9) assessing PLD in persons with traumatic brain injury and closed head injury as a behavioural problem; (10) identifying the role of the right hemisphere in executive functions as a cognitive substrate; (11) assessing the impact of pragmatic failure in speech acts on pragmatic competence; and (12) investigating the patterns of PLD among learning-disabled children. Full article

This paper explores how pre-service EFL teachers perceive the variety of methodic-didactic and pedagogical forms of differentiation that they consider as acceptable in their teaching practice and which shed light on knowledge areas related to adaptivity competence. Our investigation looks into (a) qualitative questionnaire data that depict pre-service FL teachers’ conceptualizations of what it means to be a “good” and “bad” foreign language teacher; and (b) pre-service FL teachers’ quantitative evaluations of existing differentiation approaches designed for accommodating learners, especially ones experiencing specific learning differences such as difficulties with memorization, classroom communication, anxiety, or lexical and grammar confusion. Our results show that, despite expressing general agreement towards supporting individual learners’ needs, participants’ knowledge regarding how to respond to the needs of all FL learners appropriately is incomplete. Full article

In this era of globalisation, translation technologies have become more popular in daily communication, the education sector, and the translation industry. It is observed that there is a prevalent use of machine translation (MT) among translation learners. The proper use versus abuse of MT can be a critical issue regarding its role in and impact on translation teaching. This exploratory study aims at investigating learners’ and instructors’ knowledge of MT, experience in MT use, perceived MT quality, ethics of MT use, and the perceived relationship between MT and translation training, in order to figure out the usefulness of MT in translation competence acquisition and the necessity of MT training. To this end, we conducted surveys and semi-structured interviews and found that the influence of MT in translation competence acquisition is determined by the properties of MT and learners’ quality. MT is particularly helpful in gaining lexical knowledge and knowledge to ensure translation efficiency, but not in bicultural knowledge. However, such usefulness builds on learners’ language proficiency, analytic ability, and learning motivation. In light of the findings, issues including the sustainability of MT from ethical and linguistic perspectives, and the potential and proper use of MT to inform translator training, are discussed. Full article

This paper considers the morphophonological variants found in the non-head position of Spanish productive compound patterns. In the literature it has been noted that compounds resort to both I- and O-ending stems and words (even inflected ones) to spell-out compound non-heads. The study takes a nanosyntactic approach to compound syntax and examines the functional structure of the main classes of Spanish compounds. The goal of the analysis is to show that the functional structures of compounds determine to some extent which spell-outs are chosen in lexical innovations within the schemas, and also to address the issue of why certain allomorphs never appear in a given context while others seem to compete for lexical insertion. Research was conducted using a self-compiled sample of 1250 compounds extracted from contemporary Spanish written corpora. The results provide empirical support for syntacticist approaches to compounding, in that the proposed functional structures capture the predominantly compositional semantics of compounding, and also because traditional “linking vowels” are reconsidered to be the stable and systematic spell-outs for relational categories inside compounds. Full article

The purpose of this study is to draw on the conceptual blending hypothesis from the socio-cognitive approach to investigate the conceptually equivalent translation written in L2—English—of bilingual students via two tasks of translating and defining individual words and translating texts from L1 to L2. Next, the study demonstrates how translation abilities that vary amongst groups can affect students’ lexical density, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and lexical idiosyncrasies in translated text. The translating process in bilinguals could be interpreted via the lens of the conceptual blending hypothesis and dueling contexts framework to demonstrate that bi/multilingual students do not differ from monolingual ones pertaining to cognitive or linguistic abilities. Rather, the distinctive difference between bilingual and monolingual language users is bilingual speakers’ abilities of the third competence of formulating a synergism across word concepts and utilizing a bidirectional translation between two languages. When a word in L2 is acquired, there is a conceptual blending between the new conceptual information, encoded after each time the L2 word is used in an L2 socio-cultural context and the existing socio-cultural conceptual information in L1. The new concept created after the blending is called a synergic concept. If the synergic is not well developed, the language user selects incorrect or inappropriate words in a context, resulting in lexical idiosyncrasies. Data gathered from 30 English–Chinese bilingual university students in a transnational program in sociology were collected and compared against 15 monolingual American students. The preliminary findings are as follows: (1) regardless of the location of where the English (L2) socio-cultural meaning conceptualization mainly takes place (in China or the U.S.A.), English–Chinese bilingual language users demonstrated a significant difference in connotative meaning knowledge of noun word concepts and idiomatic concepts, compared with English native speakers; (2) the synergic concepts were detected in all experimental concepts and demonstrated the conceptual blending to a varying degree that affects their translating process and its outcomes: the domineering L1 socio-cultural concept, the well-blended L1 and L2 socio-cultural concept that results in a “third culture”, and the assimilating L2 socio-cultural concept; (3) the synergistic blending of two socio-cultural loads embedded in lexical concepts detected in the bilingual students in the U.S.A. was more robust than those in China, resulting in significantly fewer sophisticated words and lexical idiosyncrasies in their English translated essays. The study sheds new light on understanding the dynamism in bilingualism via translation tasks to indicate bilingual learners’ lexical development. Implications for using translation tasks and analysis of word concepts across languages to support bi/multilingual students in language and academic learning are discussed. Full article