This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

The validity of 2 implicational universals regarding constituent order in questions is tested in the English speech of 14 native speakers of Japanese, Turkish, and Korean. The interlanguage evidence is found to be generally supportive of the 2 universals. (31 references). (Author/VWL)

A study extended previous research on second language learners' use of interlanguage knowledge in making grammaticality judgments. The grammatical construction under consideration is the existential-presentational (E-P) sentence. This construction is described, and it is shown how, due to universal constraints of information structure, it is…

The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis…

Errors in second language learning are viewed as evidence of the learner's hypotheses and strategies about the new data. Error observation and analysis are important to the formulation of theories about language learning and the preparation of teaching materials. Learning a second language proceeds by a series of approximative reorganizations…

This paper focuses on the mechanism by which the successful learner acquires a second language. The author postulates a core language, the common core of the speaker's native and target languages, and states that the second language becomes an extension of this common core. Whatever language-specific features are added while acquiring the second…