Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we…

The present study examines grammatical gender knowledge in offline production (gender marking on indefinite articles) and online gender processing (visual world paradigm) in adult second language (L2) learners of Norwegian with three different first languages (L1s): Greek, Russian, and Turkish. In particular, it investigates the role of the…

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

This article compares the use of discourse markers (DMs) in Italian as a second language (L2) produced by Belgian-Dutch learners, with the DMs produced by Italian native (L1) speakers. The quantitative analysis of the data shows that L1 speakers produce more DMs than L2 speakers, whereas the comparison between the levels of proficiency in L2…

Little is known about how hearing adults learn sign languages. Our objective in this study was to investigate how learners of British Sign Language (BSL) produce narratives, and we focused in particular on viewpoint-taking. Twenty-three intermediate-level learners of BSL and 10 deaf native/early signers produced a narrative in BSL using the…

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that the girl saw') are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that saw the girl'). Although there are different…

The present study examined the production of inalienable possession with body parts in Spanish among 20 school-age children of Mexican-born parents born and raised in the United States. The results were compared to those of 20 first-generation immigrant parents (main input providers), 27 Spanish-dominant children of similar age, and 12 Spanish…

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

As Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2012, 2016), it provides a unique lens through which to observe the extent of first-language (L1) typological influence in second language (L2) acquisition of motion expressions. This study has dual purposes. First, it extends Wu's (2016) investigation on motion…

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…