Mother tongue lost while second language intact: insights into aphasia

How is the Mother Tongue Acquired

Implementing Mother-tongue

Hong Kong is a homogeneous community both in terms of race (98% Chinese) and language (over 80% speak Cantonese as their mother tongue). However, the historical and sociolinguistic dynamics there are such that English is the dominant medium of instruction at secondary level and above, while Modern Mandarin, a non-indigenous Chinese (standard) dialect, provides the norms for both the use of Chin...

Multiword Sequences as Building Blocks for Language: Insights into First and Second Language Learning

Many grammatical frameworks view words and rules as the basic building blocks of language, with multiword sequences being treated as peripheral exceptions in the form of idioms, etc. (e.g., Pinker, 1999). The new millennium, however, has seen a shift toward construing multiword sequences not as linguistic rarities but as important building blocks for language acquisition and processing. Based o...

Electrophysiological insights into language deficits

The human capacity for communication by means of a natural language is undoubtedly one of the most complex products of evolution. Most people seem to speak and listen effortlessly. And, yet, both psycholinguistic and neuropsychological research attest to the diverse set of representations that are accessed or constructed anew during ordinary language comprehension and production. Moreover, thes...

Slips of the Tongue in Second Language Production

Ever since the publication of Fromkin’s Slips of the Tongue in 1973, more and more psycholinguists have realized the importance of studying the slips of the tongue. Dell (1986) defined slips of the tongue as “unintended, nonhabitual deviation(s) from a speech plan”. That is, those speech errors are not due to an incomplete or incorrect language system, but to language processing problems. Most ...