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,…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

The current study investigates second language acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis to probe the development of features transferred from learners' native language without robust confirming or disconfirming evidence in the second language (L2) input. It is argued that Chinese allows object ellipsis licensed by a verb with a [VCase] feature but…

Previous studies on bilingual children have shown a significant correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and a unique contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading performance in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence. However, few studies have compared…

The present study investigates native (L1) and second language (L2) processing of scope ambiguities in English sentences containing the universal quantifier every in subject NP and negation. Previous studies in L1 and L2 processing of scope ambiguities have found speakers to generally employ a 'minimal effort' principle that highly prefers the…

This study examines whether the second language acquisition (L2A) of syntactic properties at the interfaces is problematic for L2 learners. English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) was tested as an interface property which involves feature interpretability. Two subtle contrasts of VPE at different grammar-internal interfaces were examined: (a) copula…

This article reports on an empirical study on the acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers ("zai," "-zhe[subscript P]" and "-zhe[subscript R]") by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels. Compared to English, Chinese has a richer imperfective aspect in terms of markers (forms) and features (meanings).…

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native "learners" are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions ("so," "and," "although," or a "full…

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate "-ed" forms with a group of…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…