This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier "every" and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking…

This study examined the second language (L2) acquisition of the Korean plural marker -"tul" by native speakers of English. Seventy-seven learners at four Korean proficiency levels along with 31 native Korean-speaking controls completed five tasks designed to probe for knowledge of particular features and restrictions associated with so-called…

Many studies on bilingual language processing have shown that lexical access is not selective with respect to language. These studies typically used nouns as word stimuli. The aim of the present study was to extend the previous findings on noun processing to verb processing. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performed a lexical…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…

Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from…

In an event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the use of second language rhythmic properties during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Syntactically ambiguous sentences embedded in rhythmically regular and irregular contexts were presented to Turkish early and late second language (L2) learners of…

In order to identify the causes of inflectional variability in adult second-language (L2) acquisition, this study investigates lexical and syntactic aspects of gender processing in real-time L2 production and comprehension. Twenty advanced to near-native adult first language (L1) English speakers of L2 German and 20 native controls were tested in…

The aim of the article is to provide preliminary data on the use of auxiliaries and clitics in Serbian-speaking children with developmental language impairment. Two groups of children (a group of 30 children with developmental language impairment and a group of 30 typically developing children) aged between 48 and 83 months and matched on IQ took…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half…

To contribute to a better understanding of second language (L2) sentence processing, the present study examines how L2 learners parse temporarily ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses. Results are reported from both off-line and on-line experiments with three groups of advanced learners of Greek whose native languages (L1s) were Spanish,…