Third language acquisition in adulthood

In recent years, researchers have acknowledged that the study of third language acquisition cannot simply be viewed as an extension of the study of bilingualism, and the present volume’s authors agree that a point of departure that embraces the unique properties that differentiate L2 acquisition from L3/Ln acquisition is essential. From linguistic, sociological, psychological, educational and cognitive viewpoints, it has become increasingly apparent that the study of L3/Ln acquisition can provide new evidence to help resolve ongoing debates in these areas of study. This volume uniquely provides a wide-ranging overview of current trends in the study of adult additive multilingualism from formal, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, adding new insights into adult multilingual epistemology. This collection includes critical reviews of L3/Ln morphosyntax, phonology, and the lexicon, as well as individual studies with unique language pairings including Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Asian languages.

Good practice for pupils learning English as an additional language; lessons from effective literacy teachers in inner city primary schools.

This article presents observations and discussion of the successful teaching of English to pupils, in English primary schools, for whom English is an additional language (EAL). It draws on research in Year 2 (6/7year old) classes in three inner-city primary schools carried out in 2003 and 2005. Three recognised, effective teachers of literacy were selected for case study; all worked in successful schools where results for literacy, measured by national tests, were in line with or better than national averages. Following analyses of lesson observations and interviews with the teachers, their Headteachers and the EAL co-ordinators in the schools, a number of common elements in their practice emerged. Discussion centres on how these pedagogical features supported effective learning environments for the early literacy development of bilingual children, and on the implications for the practice of teaching English to all pupils.

Diversity lessons from Wales: how marketing bilingualism contributes to language shift and language maintenance

Wales is one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. While sharing much of its political and social history with England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, it has retained a distinct cultural identity.In particular, over 560,000 people, a significant minority of the population of 2.2 million, speak Welsh, a member of the Celtic family of languages, and the country is officially bilingual. In this paper, we will look at attempts to maintain and grow the number of speakers of the language and at the relevance of this development for speakers of minority languages in other settings.

Atypically rightward cerebral asymmetry in male adults with autism stratifies individuals with and without language delay

In humans, both language and fine motor skills are associated with left-hemisphere specialization, whereas visuospatial skills are associated with right-hemisphere specialization. Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) show a profile of deficits and strengths that involves these lateralized cognitive functions. Here we test the hypothesis that regions implicated in these functions are atypically rightward lateralized in individuals with ASC and, that such atypicality is associated with functional performance. Participants included 67 male, right-handed adults with ASC and 69 age- and IQ-matched neurotypical males. We assessed group differences in structural asymmetries in cortical regions of interest with voxel-based analysis of grey matter volumes, followed by correlational analyses with measures of language, motor and visuospatial skills. We found stronger rightward lateralization within the inferior parietal lobule and reduced leftward lateralization extending along the auditory cortex comprising the planum temporale, Heschl's gyrus, posterior supramarginal gyrus, and parietal operculum, which was more pronounced in ASC individuals with delayed language onset compared to those without. Planned correlational analyses showed that for individuals with ASC, reduced leftward asymmetry in the auditory region was associated with more childhood social reciprocity difficulties. We conclude that atypical cerebral structural asymmetry is a potential candidate neurophenotype of ASC

Incremental processing in head-final child language: online comprehension of relative clauses in Turkish-speaking children and adults

The present study investigates the parsing of pre-nominal relative clauses (RCs) in children for the first time with a realtime methodology that reveals moment-to-moment processing patterns as the sentence unfolds. A self-paced listening experiment with Turkish-speaking children (aged 5–8) and adults showed that both groups display a sign of processing cost both in subject and object RCs at different points through the flow of the utterance when integrating the cues that are uninformative (i.e., ambiguous in function) and that are structurally and probabilistically unexpected. Both groups show a processing facilitation as soon as the morphosyntactic dependencies are completed and parse the unbounded dependencies rapidly using the morphosyntactic cues rather than waiting for the clause-final filler. These findings show that five-year-old children show similar patterns to adults in processing the morphosyntactic cues incrementally and in forming expectations about the rest of the utterance on the basis of the probabilistic model of their language.