This study examined individual-level variability in N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native and nonnative language sentence processing of semantic and grammar information. Twenty-six native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language were tested. Participants completed sentence reading tasks in English and Spanish during EEG…

This study is a replication and extension of Morgan-Short et al.'s (2018) investigation into the role of attention in input processing by L1-Polish learners of L2-Spanish, with proficiency and language of assessment explored as two key methodological factors. Our aims were twofold: to investigate learners' comprehension in different conditions…

Although retrieval of lexical forms is a prerequisite for language production, research of L2 vocabulary learning has focused much more on meanings and form-meaning mappings than on development of detailed, accessible mental representations of forms. This is particularly true with respect to multi-word items (MWIs). We report an experimental study…

The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners' difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the…

The position of antecedent strategy (Carminati, 2002) claims that speakers of null-subject languages prefer to resolve intrasentential anaphora by linking pro to an antecedent in the specifier of the inflection phrase and the overt pronoun to an antecedent lower in the clause. The present study has two aims: (a) to determine whether adult early…

Results of a study of two methods of morpheme quantification--one by suppliance in obligatory contexts, the other by target-like use--produced substantially different percentages of accuracy for subjects' production of the morphemes progressive "-ing," progressive auxiliary, and past irregular. This demonstrates that, as a consequence of applying…

Examines the expression of temporality in the basilang speech (the earliest stage of second language development) of five adult subjects. Temporality is studied from three perspectives: morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. The taxonomy provided by the pragmatic analysis best captures the expression of time at this level of interlanguage…

The development of the concept of word is discussed in terms of specific advantages that might be available to bilingual children when compared with their monolingual peers. Three studies are reviewed in which bilingual children show more advanced understanding of some aspects of the concept of word than do monolingual children (Author/LMO)

Data collected from both native and non-native speakers' linguistic performances in five request and seven apology situations revealed a systematic difference in length of utterance in speech acts by non-native speakers as compared to native speakers. Deviation from native norms of utterance length can cause pragmatic failure in several ways.…