Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

We examine the syntactic structures exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation. Traditionally, research on the linguistic abilities of persons with dementia is either observational (reports kept by caregivers) or experimental (e.g. based on comprehension tasks), and the focus is not on the syntactic competence of the speaker. We combine…

This longitudinal study examined growth patterns of written syntactic complexity of Turkish learners of English. Using a nonexperimental corpus of 852 writing samples by 284 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners over three semesters, the study addressed the following questions: which indices of syntactic complexity characterize the writing…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

The present study focuses on the influence of starting age and input on foreign language learning. In relation to starting age, the study investigates whether early starters in instructional settings achieve the same kind of long-term advantage as learners in naturalistic settings and it complements previous research by using data from oral…

Examines the degree to which Latin words and phrases are integrated into English and American legal texts. Compares introductory and advanced textbooks to legal documents for relative frequency of Latin words and phrases and level of integration into the text. Examples of each level are presented. (Author/LMO)