The present study examines grammatical gender knowledge in offline production (gender marking on indefinite articles) and online gender processing (visual world paradigm) in adult second language (L2) learners of Norwegian with three different first languages (L1s): Greek, Russian, and Turkish. In particular, it investigates the role of the…

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to…

This study explores the development of anaphora resolution (AR) in late sequential bilinguals, namely, adult Greek learners of Spanish at three proficiency levels (intermediate, lower advanced, upper advanced). The use of an overt/null pronominal subject anaphor is investigated in three discourse contexts: topic-continuity (a single antecedent…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N = 50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of…

Dual-system models suggest that English past tense morphology involves two processing routes: rule application for regular verbs and memory retrieval for irregular verbs. In second language (L2) processing research, Ullman suggested that both verb types are retrieved from memory, but more recently Clahsen and Felser and Ullman argued that past…

This study analyses the behavior and the preferences of the Greek learners of Turkish language, who use a particular e-learning website in parallel with their studies, namely: http://turkish.pgeorgalas.gr. The website offers free online material in Greek and English language for learning the Turkish language and grammar. The traffic of several…

This study reports results from four experiments investigating the perfective past tense of Greek in adult second language (L2) learners. The data come from L2 learners of Greek with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency and different native language (L1) backgrounds, and L1 speakers of Greek. All participants were tested in both oral and…

The second language acquisition (SLA) literature reports numerous studies of proficient second language (L2) speakers who diverge significantly from native speakers despite the evidence offered by the L2 input. Recent SLA theories have attempted to account for native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) divergence by arguing for the dissociation…

Recent unrelated studies reveal what appears to be a common acquisitional pattern in second language acquisition (SLA). While some findings show that advanced learners can indeed achieve convergent, native-like competence with formal syntactic properties (even when these are underdetermined by the input), other findings suggest that they can…

The existence of optionality in acquisitional data presents a problem to the view that developing grammars do not include more than one grammatical system at any stage. In this article data from Greek and Spanish, on the one hand, and English, on the other, constitute the background for the discussion of the existence of "true" optionality in…

Considers the validity of applying common assessment instruments and scales to assess the language skills of Australian school-age language learners from different first-language backgrounds. Findings reveal a strong relationship between home exposure to the language and the level of performance on the listening and reading components of the…