This study examines first language (L1) English transfer in the acquisition of plural noun semantics in second language (L2) Arabic. Drawing on previous research on the L2 acquisition of plural noun interpretation, the study presents and discusses new production data of specific and generic definite plurals by English-speaking learners of Arabic…

Many factors influencing second language (L2) speech fluency have been widely studied, but the effects of first language (L1) fluency on L2 speech fluency are still relatively poorly understood. In contrast to mostly quantitative previous studies, the present study adopted a mixed methods approach to examining the connections between L1 fluency…

This study examined the contributions of morphological awareness (MA) to second language (L2) word meaning inferencing in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese (N = 50). Three research questions were posed: Are L2 learners sensitive to the morphological structure of unknown multi-character words? Does first language (L1) MA contribute to L2…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

This article investigates bilingual versus monolingual construal of manner of motion in speech and gesture across three languages--Mandarin, Japanese, and English--argued to be typologically distinct in speech and co-speech gesture (Brown & Chen, 2013; McNeill, 2001; Slobin, 2004b; Talmy, 1991). Narrative descriptions of motion were elicited…

The typological contrast between verb- and satellite-framed languages (Talmy, 1985) has set the basis for many empirical studies on L2 acquisition. The current analysis goes beyond this typology by looking in detail at the conceptualization of the path of motion in a motion event. We take as a starting point the cognitive salience of specific…

This study investigated whether learners of Japanese with different first language (L1) writing systems use different recognition strategies and whether second language (L2) exposure affects L2 kanji recognition. The study used a computerized lexical judgment task with 3 types of kanji characters to investigate these questions: (a)…

This study investigates dominant language transfer (from English) in adult Spanish second language (L2) learners and Spanish heritage speakers. We focus on contrasting properties of English and Spanish definite articles with respect to generic reference ("Elephants have ivory tusks" vs. "Los elefantes tienen colmillos de marfil") and inalienable…