Advances In The Investigation Of L3 Phonological Acquisition

This book aims to bridge the gap in investigations into the acquisition of phonology from a multilingual perspective. In order to fully understand this process, the editors present state of the art research into third language (L3) phonology as well as future considerations for this field. The individual contributions address limitations apparent in current literature, in terms of methodology and scope, while offering innovative solutions in the study of conceptualization, design and data analysis, and novel application of theoretical frameworks to L3 phonology. The contributions consist of a number of original studies which attempt to address vital research questions regarding a bilingual advantage for subsequent phonological acquisition, the variables that drive phonological transfer at the onset of third language acquisition, the L3 developmental path, and how L3 phonological acquisition affects existing systems. The empirical and theoretical strides made in the study of L3 phonology, provided in this volume, confirm that it is a promising area of inquiry with a growing potential to provide novel insights into the linguistic and cognitive underpinnings of language acquisition. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Multilingualism.

In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the study of third (and more) language acquisition and processing. It features 30 approachable chapters covering topics such as multilingual language acquisition, education, language maintenance and language loss, multilingual code-switching, ageing in the multilingual brain, and many more. Each chapter provides an accessible overview of the state of the art in its topic, while offering comprehensive access to the specialized literature, through carefully curated citations. It also serves as a methodological resource for researchers in the field, offering chapters on methods such as case studies, corpora, artificial language systems or statistical modelling of multilingual data.

Provides a comprehensive overview of third language acquisition (additive multilingualism) in adulthood, an increasingly important subfield of language acquisition.

English Pronunciation Instruction: Research-based insights presents recent research on L2 English pronunciation including pedagogical implications and applications, and seeks to bridge the gulf between pronunciation research and teaching practice. The volume’s 15 chapters cover a range of aspects that are central to pronunciation teaching, including the teaching of different segmental and suprasegmental features, teachers’ and learners’ views and practices, types and sources of learners’ errors, feedback and assessment, tools and strategies for pronunciation instruction, reactions towards accented speech, as well as the connection between research and teaching. Chapters offer a fully developed section on pedagogical implications with insightful suggestions for classroom instruction. This format and the variety of topics will be informative for researchers, language teachers, and students interested in English pronunciation, as it explores the diverse challenges learners of different L1 backgrounds face, and also provides research-informed techniques and recommendations on how to cope with them.

This edited book is a collection of studies on protolanguage phonology, referring to the development of children’s autonomous linguistic systems from their first meaningful forms to complete cognitive and articulatory acquisition of language. The volume comprises chapters on child bilingual phonological development, understood as the acquisition or use of more than one linguistic code, whether actual languages, dialects, or communication modes, in an array of contexts. Such contexts include endogenous and exogenous bilingualism, heritage language, bilectalism, trilingualism, and typical and atypical use. The contributed works here will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students investigating language acquisition in bi-/multilingual settings, as well as those working on child phonological development across a variety of languages.

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research.

This book brings together papers dealing with essential issues in applied linguistics and multilingualism that have been contributed by leading figures in these two fields and present state-of-the-art developments in theory and research. The first part includes articles touching on various aspects of multiple-language acquisition, with a particular emphasis on the role of affordances, the interfaces between language and thought, and factors influencing the process of language learning. Part Two deals with individual variations in the acquisition of additional languages, focusing in particular on the impact of such variables as age, aptitude, motivation and learning deficits. Finally, Part Three presents contributions illuminating key issues in the acquisition of different subsystems and skills, such as grammar, phonology, lexis and writing systems. Thanks to the diversity of perspectives on applied linguistics and multilingualism, as well as the cutting-edge nature of some of the proposals, this edited collection will be an important reference work and a source of inspiration for theorists and researchers.