Reading picture books in the first language (L1) before rereading them second (L2) is assumed to be beneficial for young dual learners (DLLs). This pilot study examined how sharing digital L1 or L2 at home reading kindergarten affected book-specific vocabulary learning and story comprehension. Participants were 14 three- four-year-old children who spoke Polish learned Norwegian as their languag...

The purpose of the study is to compare the writing proficiencies of firstand second-language learners and to examine their teachers’ beliefs about the writing students produce. The four fifth-graders were nominated by their teachers as either strong or weak writers. Text analysis methods were used to analyze the writing proficiencies manifested in the compositions and interviews with the teache...

An important question in research about bilingualism is whether translation from a second language (L2) to the native language (L1) is semantically mediated or whether it occurs through word associations at the lexical level. Recent research has shown that both L1 and L2 number word translation imply semantic access, suggesting strong L2 lexicosemantic mappings for number words (Duyck & Brysbae...

In his seminal paper on the ‘fundamental difference’ between first and second language (L1 and L2) acquisition, Bley-Vroman (1990) proposed that this disparity is due to the lack of continued access to Universal Grammar and the unavailability of ‘domain-specific learning procedures’ beyond a critical period in child language development. He considered four possible alternative accounts of this ...

Speaker accent influences the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Knowledge of accent-based acoustic variations can therefore be used in the development of more robust systems. This paper investigates the differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) English in South Africa and is specifically aimed at L2 English speakers with a native African mother tongu...

In this study an attempt was made to construct a multi-factor model predicting the development of reading literacy in the upper grades of primary school in the Netherlands for subgroups of 729 first language (L1) learners and 93 second language (L2) learners. Following a longitudinal design, it was explored to what extent the variation in reading literacy development in L1 and L2 from grade 4 t...

This study presents cross-sectional data on adjectival agreement in second-language (L2) learners of Norwegian with four different first languages (L1s). The target language has full noun phrase between article, adjective and noun, the source represent conditions, similar to or from language. Sixteen participated study, their oral production was analysed individually. Two hypotheses were propos...

This paper represents a preliminary study in a longer-range project in which rhythm is considered a central organizing factor in speech perception and production. Our hypothesis is that the ability to perceive the rhythm-bearing unit of L2 (second language) substantially improves the L1 (first language) listener's ability to perceive the spoken L2 language. The preliminary study here reports on...