Contrastive Analysis, since its introduction as a potential predictor of the influence of the learners' first language on the second language and the resultant errors, has constantly been subject to criticism on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This once-popular approach of interpreting errors resulting from the interference from the native…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This study expands on previous research into filler-gap dependency processing in second language (L2) English, by means of a replication of Canales's (2012) self-paced reading study. Canales, among others, found that advanced L2-English speakers exhibited the same processing behavior that Stowe (1986) found for native English processing: On…

When inferring the meaning of unknown words in a second language, learners make use of a variety of cues including the cross-linguistic formal similarities of loanwords and cognates. However, because learners do not always recognize these cross-linguistic relationships, cognate strategy training has been recommended. The present study investigated…

Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

Upon acquiring or learning another language, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is an inevitable phenomenon with which a bilingual speaker lives. One key aspect of CLI is its bidirectionality, flowing between both the first (L1) and second languages (L2) mutually affecting each other. However, investigations of L1 CLI on L2 have dominated previous…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

Since the Korean pronoun system does not specify gender indication, Korean speakers of English tend to have difficulties when they use English pronouns. This paper explores how absence of obligatory gender marking in Korean affects gender errors in the production of English. Gender pronoun errors made by Korean learners of English were analyzed…

The objective of this study was to identify, describe and classify errors in the Russian and English speech of the native Kazakh speakers working in the oil industry as well as to give a possible explanation of the reasons for their occurrence. The cross-linguistic interference characteristics of the Kazakhs' speech were investigated with the…

This study compared Spanish-English bilinguals' and English monolinguals' VOT values for /b, d, g/ in cognates and non-cognates. Twenty-six young adult participants (fourteen bilinguals and twelve monolinguals, mean age 24 years) were administered a picture-naming task, balanced for cognate and non-cognate forms. VOT values of 30 target words per…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

In the present study we examined whether overlap in language across texts influences the integration of information into a coherent discourse representation for bilingual readers. Across two experiments highly proficient Spanish--English bilinguals read pairs of expository passages describing two fictional science facts while their eye-movements…