This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

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).…

The present study used event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how native (L1) German-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English process sentences containing filler-gap dependencies such as "Bill liked the house (women) that Bob built some ornaments for __ at his workplace." Using an experimental design which allowed us to…

This article investigates near-native grammars at the syntax--discourse interface by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of two different domains of object movement in Dutch, which exhibit syntax-discourse or syntax-semantics level properties. English and German near-native speakers of Dutch, where German but not English allows the same…

In recent second language (L2) research it has been proposed that unlike linguistic phenomena pertaining to internal interfaces, those at external interfaces pose greater difficulty to adult L2 learners and may not be fully acquired. It has further been pointed out that such problematic acquisition at the interface level should not be attributed…

The current study tests the Interface Hypothesis through forward and backward anaphora in complex sentences with temporal subordinate clauses in highly proficient English-speaking learners' second-language (L2) Chinese. Forward anaphora is involved when the overt pronoun "ta" "he/she" or a null element appears in the subject…

This article investigates how adult Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English definite descriptions ("the book," "the books") and demonstrative descriptions ("that book," "those books"). Korean lacks articles, but has demonstratives, and it is hypothesized that transfer leads learners to (initially) equate definites with…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

It has been proposed that external interfaces are vulnerable to residue optionality, whereas pure syntax and internal interfaces are acquirable in second language (L2) acquisition (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006). The proposal was tested in this article through the interpretation of overt and null embedded arguments in L2 Chinese…

A study compared the use of passive morphology with unaccusative verbs by 38 adult Chinese learners of English as a Second Language with that of native English speakers. On a grammaticality judgment task and a controlled production (cloze) task, the Chinese subjects both used passive morphology and judged it as grammatically inappropriate with all…