Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an…

This article focuses on the role of crosslinguistic patterns with verbs in the mapping of noun phrases/semantic roles to positions in morphosyntax, with a particular focus on second language (L2) development of Spanish "se." The data set derives from high school learners of Spanish in the United States under broadly deductive and…

Languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English ("Jen had her computer fixed") is conveyed using an active structure in Korean ("Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed"), and yet little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such…

Work supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to the University of Hawaii. (RS)

Suggests that the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) be revised to incorporate a notion of degree of difficulty which corresponds to the notion of typological markedness. (Author/CFM)

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Investigated the acquisition of base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese by British students learning Chinese. The hypothesis is not confirmed that it would not be difficult for English speakers to acquire the base-generated topic in Chinese because in the acquisition of Chinese, English-speaking learners are exposed to positive evidence of…

A review of research about second language learning indicates that nonprimary acquisition is sensitive to the center-periphery distinction. There is clear evidence that this construct has reflexes in interlanguage word order with respect to the probability of native word order influence, difficulty, and order of emergence. (CB)

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…