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Increasing numbers of international students enter university education via English language bridging programs. Much research has overlooked the nature of second language reading development during a bridging program, focusing instead on the development of literacy skills of international students who already meet the language requirement for undergraduate admission. We report a longitudinal eye-movement study assessing English passage reading efficiency and comprehension in 405 Chinese-speaking bridging program students. Incoming IELTS reading scores were used as an index of baseline reading ability. Linear mixed-effects regression models fitted to global eye-movement measures and reading comprehension indicated that despite initial between-subjects differences, within-subject change at each ability level progressed at the same rate, following parallel growth trajectories. Therefore, there was significant overall reading progress during the bridging program, but no evidence that the gap between low and high ability readers either closed or widened over time.

Exposure to statistical patterns of language use affects language production and comprehension. In this longitudinal study of English language learner (ELL) university students, we examined the interplay between language experience and language statistics as a window into the formation and stability of morphological representations in memory. We hypothesized that within-participant change in sensitivity to distributional properties of complex words on written production would reflect changes in morphological knowledge. At two timepoints, separated by 8 months of language exposure, a sample of ELLs (n = 196) completed a written suffix completion task. The largest gains in production accuracy were observed for derived words ending in less productive suffixes. In addition, across both timepoints we found a consistent effect of derivational family entropy, such that derived words belonging to morphological families with equally dominant members were less accurately produced. Both effects indicate that ELLs exploit distributional cues to morphological structure and shed light on two aspects of morphological knowledge in ELLs. First, knowledge of suffixes becomes more entrenched in memory, independently of knowledge of the full forms of derived words. Second, ELLs draw upon interlexical connections between morphological family members during written word production.

Current models of spoken word recognition have been predominantly based on studies of Indo-European languages. As a result, less is known about the recognition processes involved in the perception of tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese), and the role of lexical tone in speech perception. One view is that words in tonal languages are processed phonologically through individual segments, while another view is that they are processed lexically as a whole. Moreover, a recent study claimed to be the first to discover an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin (Huang et al., 2014). There seems to be a lack of investigations concerning tonal languages, as no clear conclusions have been reached about the nature of tonal processes, or a model of spoken word recognition that best incorporates lexical tone. The current study addressed these issues by presenting 18 native Mandarin speakers with aural sentences with medial target words. These either matched or mismatched the preceding visually presented sentences with medial target words (e.g, 家 /jia1/home). Violation conditions involved target words that differed in the following ways: tone violation, where only the tone was different (e.g., 价 /jia4/“price”), onset violation, where only the onset was different (e.g., 虾 /xia1/“shrimp”), and syllable violation, where both the tone and the onset were different (e.g., 糖 /tang2/“candy”). We did not find evidence for an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin. Instead, our findings indicate that Mandarin syllables are processed incrementally through phonological segments and that tone is strongly associated with lexical access. These results are discussed with respect to modifications for existing models in spoken word recognition to incorporate the processes involved with tonal language recognition.

Aspects of the semantics of colour terms in English-lexifier Atlantic creoles have been observed by creolists, and have generally been attributed to West African substrate influence. This paper explores, through lexicographic evidence, the basic colour term inventories displayed by English-lexifier Caribbean varieties, and one West African variety, from the perspective of research on the universals of colour terms initiated by Berlin and Kay. It is argued that West African substrate influence (revisited from the perspective of cross-linguistic research on colour terms) and considerations from a universalist perspective best account for the colour term systems displayed by English-lexifier Atlantic creoles, although possible superstrate influence is also briefly explored. Insights from the research on universals of colour terms, such as colour term hierarchies and trajectories, the salience of certain categories, and the relationship between technological complexity and colour term inventories, prove useful in a discussion of colour terms that is framed within an account of creole development that admits multiple contributing factors.