This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach--combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data--in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis…

According to the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH), "[n]once borrowings pattern exactly like their native counterparts in the (unmixed) recipient language" (Poplack & Meechan, 1998a, p. 137). Nonce borrowings (Sankoff, Poplack & Vanniarajan, 1990, p. 74) are "lone other-language items" which differ from established borrowings in terms of frequency…

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses ("il veut pas payer pour ca [approximately] il veut pas payer pour" "he doesn't want to pay for [it]") and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative…

A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the…

This paper investigates the role of amount of current and "cumulative" exposure in bilingual development and ultimate attainment by exploring the extent to which simultaneous bilingual children's knowledge of grammatical gender is affected by current and previous amount of exposure, including in the early years. Elicited production and…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

Many words have more than one translation across languages. Such "translation-ambiguous" words are translated more slowly and less accurately than their unambiguous counterparts. We examine the extent to which word context and translation dominance influence the processing of translation-ambiguous words. We further examine how these factors…

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

Previous studies demonstrate that lexical coding of colour influences categorical perception of colour, such that participants are more likely to rate two colours to be more similar if they belong to the same linguistic category (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005). Recent work shows changes in Greek-English bilinguals' perception of within and…

The purpose of this article was to test the predictions of a speech production model of cross-linguistic influence in French-English bilingual children. A speech production model predicts bidirectional influence (i.e., bilinguals' greater use of periphrastic constructions like the hat of the dog relative to monolinguals in English and reversed…

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998;…

Learning to read in any language requires learning to map among print, sound and meaning. Writing systems differ in a number of factors that influence both the ease and the rate with which reading skill can be acquired, as well as the eventual division of labor between phonological and semantic processes. Further, developmental reading disability…

Executive control abilities and lexical access speed in Stroop performance were investigated in English monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals (English-Chinese and Chinese-English) in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Predictions were based on a bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis, implicating cognitive control ability as the…

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals' two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we…