Adult second language learners arrive at the language learning situation with an already formed first language grammar system in place. The study of cross-language similarity across the first and second languages explores how the similarities and differences in the two languages make learning more or less difficult, particularly for adult…

The aim of this study is to underline the contingent problems of learners of Turkish, which is an agglutinative language and to shed light on power of mental lexicon. In this descriptive study, vocabulary challenge is investigated as it is one of the main problems for learners studying Turkish as a foreign language (TFL). This study provides…

The present paper addresses the study of non-arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non-arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence-processing neural networks are trained in a set…

We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffuse tensor imaging (DTI) to study neural implications of silent reading of words in mutually comprehensible but visually and orthographically distinct languages for example Hindi and Urdu by independent groups of skilled readers. The fMRI results (conjunction analyses) showed the…

This study investigated the influence of phonological word representations from both first language (L1) and second language (L2) on third language (L3) lexical learning in L1-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. More specifically, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether L1 Spanish and L2 English phonology modulates…

Humans have a limited capacity to identify concurrent, briefly presented targets. Recent experiments using concurrent rapid serial visual presentation of letters in horizontally displaced streams have documented a deficit specific to the stream in the right visual field. The cause of this deficit might be either prioritization of the left item…

The present study aimed to refine current hypotheses regarding thematic reversal anomalies, which have been found to elicit either N400 or--more frequently--"semantic-P600" (sP600) effects. Our goal was to investigate whether distinct ERP profiles reflect aspectual-thematic differences between Agent-Subject Verbs (ASVs; e.g., "to eat") and…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, and priming) to examine three domains of…