The role of semantic attunement in bilingualism and second language learning

Different languages include different information about the events they describe in their verbs. When learning their native language, children come to attend specifically to the information that its verbs describe, a process called semantic attunement (Golinkoff et al., 2025). Those who learn a second language as an adult often continue to follow these attentional biases when they speak and write (e.g., Song et al., 2016), resulting in utterances that do not conform to the language being learned (the L2). Lucy (2004) called this effect semantic accent. Many questions remain about semantic attunement, especially in the realm of bilingualism. In particular, it is possible that second-language education ought to include direct instruction about the semantic biases of the target language. Doing so may help students produce more native-sounding language sooner in their training. Apparently, such comparative instruction is not presently offered – at least at the college level. / Keywords: semantic attunement, language development, bilingualism, second language instruction, second language learning