People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

Existing research on second language (L2) pronoun resolution has not yet looked at immediate and cumulative priming effects. By using a sentence comprehension task, the present study aims at priming dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns. We test a group of native speakers and a group of intermediate-proficiency L2 learners of…

This dissertation represents the first attempt to integrate typological, semantic, and psycholinguistic perspectives to elucidate a semantically "bizarre" and "illogical" phenomenon called "expletive negation" (henceforth, EN) which is well known in Romance languages but has so far attracted little attention outside…

In pedagogical debates about Global Englishes (GE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), there is widespread agreement concerning an urgent need for liberating teachers and students from the normative constraints of ELT's orientation towards standard English by raising their awareness of the characteristics and complexities of GE/ELF…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

According to previous research, speakers of European languages parse regularly-inflected, morphologically-complex words into stems and grammatical affixes during word recognition. In contrast, some studies suggest that late second language (L2) learners do not. We ask how these types of words are processed in Arabic, a language whose primary…

This study explores the most perceivable phonological features of Hong Kong (HK) L2 English speakers and how they affect the perception of HK L2 English speech from the perspective of both native and non-native English listeners. Conversational interviews were conducted to collect speech data from 20 HK speakers of English and 10 native speakers…

This article examines the influence of gradient foreign accentedness on lexical competition during spoken word recognition. Using native and Mandarin-accented English words ranging in degree of foreign accentedness, we investigate the effect of increased accentedness on (a) the size of the competitor space and (b) the strength and duration of…

This thesis examines whether native, heritage, and L2 speakers of Spanish engage a morphological layer of representation in the processing of inflected words, and whether they do so with both regularly- and irregularly-inflected words. Also examined is whether this tendency towards compositional (i.e. morphological rule-based) processing is…

This study examined contributions of lexical factors to native-speaking raters' assessments of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Extemporaneous oral narratives elicited from 40 French speakers of L2 English were transcribed and evaluated for comprehensibility by 10 raters. Subsequently, the samples were…

Grammatical agreement makes different demands on speakers of different languages. Being widespread in the languages of the world, the features of agreement systems offer valuable tests of how language affects deep-seated domains of human cognition and categorization. Number agreement is one such domain, with intriguing evidence that typological…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

Most empirical research in L2 vowel perception focuses on the development of groups of learners. However, recent studies indicate that individual learners' developmental paths in L2 vowel perception may not be uniform (e.g., Escudero, 2001; Escudero and Boersma, 2004; Morrison, 2009). The aim of the present study is to add to this line of research…