Native speakers of languages with transparent gender systems can use gender cues to anticipate upcoming words. To examine whether this also holds true for a non-transparent two-way gender system, i.e. Dutch, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to click on one of four displayed items on a screen (e.g., Klik op [Formula: see text] rode appel [Formula: see text], 'Click on the[Formula: see text] red apple[Formula: see text]'). The items contained the target, a colour- and/or gender-matching competitor, and two unrelated distractors. A mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that the presence of a colour-matching and/or gender-matching competitor significantly slowed the process of finding the target. The gender effect, however, was only observed for common nouns, reflecting the fact that neuter gender-marking cannot disambiguate as all Dutch nouns become neuter when used as diminutives. The gender effect for common nouns occurred before noun onset, suggesting that gender information is, at least partially, activated automatically before encountering the noun.

An increasing number of adults learn more than one foreign language simultaneously. While the cognitive benefits of using multiple languages from birth have been studied extensively, little is known about possible cognitive benefits of learning multiple languages simultaneously in adulthood. Among the cognitive abilities which play a role in language learning, language aptitude (LA) and working memory (WM) are argued to be crucial. Traditionally considered relatively stable, recently they are advocated to be changeable. For example, one could imagine that learning new sounds, words, and structures in a language might both enhance the ability to temporarily hold and manage information (WM) and improve the ease with which subsequent languages are learnt (LA). Therefore, this study investigates whether LA and WM change while learning languages, and whether language learning intensity, i.e. learning one versus two foreign languages simultaneously, modulates this effect. Participants consisted of first-year and second-year Chinese university students majoring in English or English & Japanese/Russian. Data were collected twice with an interval of one academic year. The results show that all learners improved in certain aspects of LA and WM, and that among the first-year students, the two-foreign-languages learners outperformed their counterparts in WM improvement. The implications are discussed.

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The present study is inspired by the often heard Chinese university level students’ complaint that they do not improve in English proficiency during their university courses. With a pre-post design, the study explores the potential gains in language development in free response data (writing samples) of three groups of L2 learners: a senior high school group and two university groups of different proficiency levels. Four writing samples, two collected at the beginning and two at the end of the students’ respective courses, were scored holistically on general proficiency and analytically on 47 complexity measures in a computerized tool (Synlex Analyzer). The holistic scores showed some improvement over time for the high school group, but not for the university groups. The analytical measures showed improvements in fairly different aspects of the written language for the three groups, suggesting that at different levels of proficiency different variables may develop. The highest level group actually regressed in almost all syntactic variables, but additional hand coded measures point to a subtle move toward a more academic style of writing with more non-finite constructions. The findings suggest that no single complexity measure is robust for all proficiency levels and that for the highest levels, other metrics tapping into inter-clausal complexity should be added.

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