The regular-irregular dissociation in non-native English past tense

The present article investigates Pinker’s (1991) Dual Mechanism model in non-native (and native) morphology. Adult Greek learners and English natives produced the past tense of English pseudo-verbs varying in their similarity to existing verbs. Results seem problematic for Dual Mechanism and indicate no qualitative difference between L1 and L2 regarding the representation of regular/irregular morphology

Family and school language input: Their role in bilingual children’s vocabulary development

The current paper constitutes part of a large project on bilingual acquisition and bilingual education and attempts to assess language dominance in bilingual children through questionnaires and standardized language tests. Mainly, this paper investigates the correlation between (a) language dominance as attested by answers in questionnaires that relate to amount of exposure to L1/L2 input, as well as types and context (formal/informal) of input in either language, and (b) language dominance as revealed by diagnostic verbal tests. One of the target languages is Greek, an underinvestigated language in bilingualism, and the other language is German.Results indicate complex correlations between the two types of instruments with respect to language dominance, with one of the main findings being the significance of formal education in either or both of the target languages. These results point to the importance of bilingual as opposed to monolingual literacy development for language dominance, which implies the need to support the native language of immigrant, minority group or middle class children in the school setting

Oral application of SILL questionnaire using the bar for frequency and evaluation of strategy use by Muslim pupils in Thrace

Twelve Turkish-Greek bilingual learners of English were orally administered a translated version of the SILL questionnaire (Oxford 1990) and had to specify frequency of language learning strategy (LLS) use as well as confidence in the effectiveness of each strategy on a [01] bar instead of the usual Likert scales. Deviations between frequency and confidence in the results indicate that learners either appreciate the effectiveness of a strategy but they do not know how to use it or that they use a strategy without firmly believing in its usefulness, which suggests the need for pedagogical interventions to raise the learners’ awareness of language learning strategies and how to use them. More proficient learners exhibit higher frequency and confidence in reported LLS use than their less proficient peers, while the age of the learners does not seem to affect LLS use

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition.

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children's linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8-12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting. The findings demonstrate that the two groups performed similarly in the grammaticality scores of the SR. However, monolinguals outperformed the monoliterate bilinguals in SR accuracy, as well as in the visuospatial working memory and updating tasks. The findings did not indicate any bilingual advantage in cognitive performance. The results also demonstrate that updating and visuospatial working memory significantly predicted monolingual children's SR accuracy scores, whereas Greek vocabulary predicted the performance of our monoliterate bilingual children in the same task. We attribute this outcome to the fact that monoliterate bilingual children do not rely on their fluid cognitive resources to perform the task, but instead rely on language proficiency (indicated by expressive vocabulary) while performing the SR