This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun 'self' within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to…

In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we explore the extent to which conflicting first-language (L1) based grammatical parses influence second-language (L2) learners' on-line and off-line interpretation of sentences in the L2. We used cross-linguistic structural priming to potentially boost competition from the L1 grammar during the…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form--meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [±…

This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /i?/ and [character omitted] in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and…

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers' (n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is "wh"-scope marking, a cross-linguistically…

Native speakers show systematic variation in a range of linguistic domains as a function of a variety of sociolinguistic variables. This article addresses native language variation in the context of multicompetence, i.e. knowledge of two languages in one mind (Cook, 1991). Descriptions of motion were elicited from functionally monolingual and…

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends…

Most studies in the second language (L2) literature that deal with interface issues do so in holistic terms. On the one hand, researchers have suggested that interface relations between the syntax and other domains are particularly difficult for adult L2 learners. On the other, it has been argued that such relations can be established in a…

In this article, an empirical study of how Chinese wh-questions are mentally represented in Japanese speakers' grammars of Chinese as a second language (L2) is reported. Both Chinese and Japanese are generally considered "wh-in-situ" languages in which a wh-word is allowed to remain in its base-generated position, and both languages use question…

In English and Chinese, questions with a "wh"-object and a universally quantified subject (e.g. "What did everyone buy?") allow an individual answer ("Everyone bought apples.") and a pair-list answer ("Sam bought apples, Jo bought bananas, Sally bought..."). By contrast, the pair-list answer is reportedly unavailable in Japanese and Korean. This…