OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to evaluate variations in cortical activation in early and late Uygur-Chinese bilinguals from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. Methodology: During a semantic judgment task with visual stimulation by a single Chinese or Uygur word, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed. The fMRI data regarding activated cortical areas and volu...

The revised hierarchical model of bilingualism (e.g., Kroll & Stewart, 1994) assumes that second language (L2) words primarily access semantics through their first language (L1) translation equivalents. Consequently, backward translation from L2 to L1 should not imply semantic access but occurs through lexical wordform associations. However, recent research with Dutch-French bilinguals showed t...

 Lexicalization-patterns, the way words are mapped onto concepts, differ from one language      to another. This study investigated the influence of first language (L1) lexicalization patterns on the processing of second language (L2) words in sentential contexts by both less proficient and more proficient Persian learners of English. The focus was on cases where two different senses of a polys...

This paper reports a latent variable study exploring the specific links between executive processes of working memory, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, and proficiency in first (L1), second (L2), and third (L3) languages in 8to 9-year-olds experiencing multilingual education. Children completed multiple L1-measures of complex span, verbal short-term storage, and phonologi...

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phon...

This study uses near-infrared spectroscopy in young infants in order to elucidate the nature of functional cerebral processing for speech. Previous imaging studies of infants' speech perception revealed left-lateralized responses to native language. However, it is unclear if these activations were due to language per se rather than to some low-level acoustic correlate of spoken language. Here w...

This paper proposes an approach to improve word alignment for languages with scarce resources using bilingual corpora of other language pairs. To perform word alignment between languages L1 and L2, we introduce a third language L3. Although only small amounts of bilingual data are available for the desired language pair L1-L2, large-scale bilingual corpora in L1-L3 and L2-L3 are available. Base...

An EEG coherence study was performed with a twofold objective: first, to scrutinize the theoretical concept of "cortical efficiency" in connection with second language (L2) acquisition and, second, to detect cooperations between cortical areas in specific frequency bands indicative for highly proficient L2 processing. Two groups differing only in their level of L2 proficiency were contrasted du...

PURPOSE The goals of this study were to evaluate the impact of short-term phonological awareness (PA) instruction presented in children's first language (L1; Spanish) on gains in their L1 and second language (L2; English) and to determine whether relationships exist between vocabulary size, verbal working memory, and PA in Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). METHOD Participants...

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner’s first (L1; such as L1 tonal status or tone type) well extralinguistic (such musical experience and working memory) modulate learning facility. However, how L1-specific affect performance together dynamic ways less unde...