Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2023

The role of proficiency is widely discussed in multilingual language acquisition research, and yet, there is little consensus as to how one should operationalize it in our empirical investigations. The present study assesses the validity of the LexTALE (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012) as a ‘quick and valid’ measure of global proficiency. We first provide an overview review of how the LexTALE has been used since its publication, showing that although the test has gained popularity in the last few years, its reliability has not been thoroughly examined. Thus, herein we present results of a partial replication of Lemhöfer and Broersma (2012), where we empirically assess the validity of the LexTALE as a measure of L2 global proficiency in two groups of learners of English with various degrees of proficiency (L1 Spanish, n = 288; L1 Chinese, n = 266). Results indicate that if we are to use LexTALE in our investigations, we should do so with caution as the analyses show that irrespective of the L1 and level of proficiency of the targeted participants, its reliability as a measure of global proficiency is under question evidenced by the low and moderate correlations found with a standardised measure of global proficiency.

Previous studies have shown that bilingual children typically score more poorly on nonword repetition (NWR) tasks than monolingual peers, which has been attributed to bilinguals’ lower proficiency in the language that the NWR task is based on. To enable fairer assessments of bilingual children, Cross-Linguistic NWR tasks (CL-NWR tasks) have been developed that are based on the linguistic properties of many languages. The aim of this study is to investigate whether young children’s performance on a CL-NWR is less dependent on existing knowledge of a specific language than performance on a Language-Specific (Dutch-based) NWR (LS-NWR). Bilingual and multilingual two- and three-year-olds (N = 216) completed a CL-NWR and LS-NWR, as well as a Dutch receptive vocabulary task. Parents reported the number of languages children spoke other than Dutch. Results of linear mixed-effect regressions showed that Dutch vocabulary scores related to performance on the CL-NWR task less strongly than to performance on the LS-NWR task. The number of non-Dutch languages spoken did not differentially relate to performance on the two tasks. These findings indicate that CL-NWR tasks – at least as used here – allow for more language-neutral NWR assessments within linguistically diverse samples, already at toddler age.

This paper reports on an experimental investigation of what second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers of Russian know about the relationship between word order and information structure in Russian. The participants completed a bimodal acceptability judgment task, rating the acceptability of SVO and OVS word orders in narrow-focus contexts, under neutral prosody. Heritage speakers behaved like the control group of baseline speakers, preferring SVO order in answer to object questions, and OVS order in answer to subject questions. In contrast, L2 learners preferred SVO order regardless of the context. While the heritage speaker group was more proficient than the L2 group, proficiency alone cannot account for differences in performance: specifically, with regard to acceptance of OVS order for subject narrow focus, heritage speakers improved with proficiency, but L2 learners did not. It is proposed that heritage speakers have an advantage in this domain due to early age of acquisition (cf. Montrul, 2008). This finding is consistent with prior literature on narrow focus with heritage speakers of other languages, and suggests that this phenomenon is not particularly vulnerable in heritage languages.

Despite the importance of conscious awareness in second language acquisition theories, little is known about how L2 speech perception can be improved by explicit phonetic instruction. This study examined the relationship between phonological awareness and perception in Dutch younger and older adult L2 listeners, focusing on English contrasts of two types: a familiar contrast in an unfamiliar position (word-final /t/-/d/) and an unfamiliar contrast (/æ/-/ε/). Awareness was assessed with a task in which written minimal pairs and homophone pairs had to be judged as sounding the same or different. Perception was assessed with a two-alternative forced-choice identification task with auditorily presented words from minimal pairs. We investigated whether listeners’ awareness and perception improved after a video-based explicit instruction that oriented their attention to one of these contrasts, and we tested whether including information about the phonetic cue of vowel duration increased learning. Awareness and perception of each contrast were shown to be moderately correlated at the study’s outset. Furthermore, awareness and perception for each contrast generally improved more after the instruction drawing attention to that contrast. However, the effectiveness of explicit phonetic instruction varied depending on the combination of the contrast, cue information, and listener age group.

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of a constraint on definiteness in Japanese floating numeral quantifiers (NQs) by native English and Korean speakers. The constraint arises because of the specific structural relation between a floating NQ and its associated noun, resulting in an obligatorily indefinite interpretation. The indirect – or, covert – encoding of definiteness in this structure allows investigation of predictions based on the cline of difficulty proposed by Cho and Slabakova (2014), whereby L2 acquisition of a covert property may be facilitated if the first language (L1) expresses the relevant feature overtly. English is such a language, having overt morphology to express definiteness, whereas Korean has floating NQs that are obligatorily, and covertly, indefinite, as in Japanese. Sensitivity to definiteness in Japanese floating NQs was measured using an acceptability judgement task. Although both L1-Korean and L1-English speakers of Japanese showed sensitivity to the constraint at group level, follow-up analyses suggested that the Korean group had more consistent knowledge. We argue that the complexity of the acquisition task – which was greater for the English-speakers than the Korean-speakers – played a bigger role in attainment than overt versus covert encoding of the relevant feature in the L1.