A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

A pervasive question in second language (L2) research is whether L2 learners can acquire parameterized functional features that are not instantiated in their first language (L1). While some researchers have argued for a representational deficit (e.g., Clahsen & Muysken, 1989; Hawkins & Chan, 1997), claiming that L2 learners' competence is…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the real-time sentence processing of Korean both by native speakers and learners in terms of the availability and the effectiveness of different types of information in the structural prediction. Built on the crosslinguistically contrastive findings between Japanese in Yoshida (2006) and Chinese in…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…