The present article examines the proposal that typology is a major factor guiding transfer selectivity in L3/L<i>n</i> acquisition. We tested first exposure in L3/L<i>n</i> using two artificial languages (ALs) lexically based in English and Spanish, focusing on gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and between nouns and adjectives. 50 L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers took part in the experiment. ...

The present study aims to throw light on the behavior of the Spanish copulas ser and estar in locative sentences, beyond their classical distinction in terms of Individual-Level (IL) versus Stage-Level (SL) predicates. The behavior of the Spanish copulas in locative contexts constitutes an oddity that we aim to probe here: events (concierto ‘concert’), despite their clear spatial and temporal ...

We used event-related potentials to investigate how markedness impacts person agreement in English-speaking learners of L2-Spanish. Markedness was examined by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person subjects with third-person verbs and vice-versa. Native speakers showed a P600 for both errors, larger ...

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical ...

Being able to speak and/or understand multiple languages is a ubiquitous human behavior. Over the past decades in particular, an increasing amount of research has investigated the acquisition, processing, and use of multiple languages as well as how variation therein associates with differential cognitive performance, brain functions and structures (see Bialystok, 2016, Bialystok, 2017, De Houwer, ...

In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investigation on German, the goal of the present study is ...

The keynote article by Titone & Tiv (2022) represents a key step forward in characterizing and quantifying bilingual experience, and how this may be leveraged to examine neurocognitive outcomes. The framework takes a novel multi-leveled approach to capturing and describing language experience. The first level handles the direct language use dynamics of a given individual or ego-driven language dynamics. ...

Research on multilingual lexical organization is coming to a consensus, led by a growing body of studies (e.g., De Groot, Delmaar & Lupker, 2000; Dijkstra, Grainger & Van Heuven, 1999; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Van Heuven, Schriefers, Dijkstra & Hagoort, 2008), whereby the multilingual lexicon is seen as a unitary system and cross-linguistic competition occurs during lexical access. This increasing ...

Recent experiments have confirmed earlier informal evidence that finite adjuncts are not islands categorically. Specifically, it has been shown that adjuncts are not necessarily islands for all dependency types (Sprouse et al. 2016), and that the island status of an adjunct depends on the type of the adjunct clause in question (Kush et al. 2019; Müller 2019; Bondevik et al. 2021; Nyvad et al. ...