Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

The present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of…

Usage-based theory has proposed that learning of linguistic constructions is facilitated by input that contains few high-frequency exemplars, in what is known as a skewed (or Zipfian) input distribution. Early empirical work provided support to this idea, but subsequent L2 research has provided mixed findings. However, previous approaches have not…

Recent research has shown that knowledge of second language (L2) collocations is important to learners for improving their language processing and production but also that acquiring L2-specific collocations is a very burdensome task for learners. Thus, bootstrapping knowledge of L2 collocations through generalization is highly desirable, but this…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

This article focuses on the role of crosslinguistic patterns with verbs in the mapping of noun phrases/semantic roles to positions in morphosyntax, with a particular focus on second language (L2) development of Spanish "se." The data set derives from high school learners of Spanish in the United States under broadly deductive and…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

This research addresses implicit learning of temporal meanings in English by adult non-native readers of German, a language without morphosyntactic imperfective aspect. Twenty-four learners from mixed first languages participated in a norming study assessing unenhanced aspect awareness. Then, in a second experiment, 91 native-German learners…

This study investigated Thai EFL learners' acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford's (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

Conceptual Metaphor (CM; e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Kovecses, 2020) is central to our thinking and ubiquitously manifested in our language. Given its importance, the teaching of conceptual metaphors has gained much attention in Cognitive Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. While most empirical studies have focused on specific aspects…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

In Germanic and Slavic languages, the Verb is the most extensive grammatical item, which causes most of the troubles for second language learners. It has been noticed that Slavic L1 learners of English make mistakes in using verb forms due to the transfer of their L1 grammatical system (grammar concepts) onto the English language. The goal of the…

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that the pragmatic-discursive interface with syntax is more vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence than the syntactic-semantic interface [Tsimpli, Ianthi, and Antonella Sorace. 2006. "Differentiating Interfaces: L2 Performance in Syntax- Semantics and Syntax-Discourse Phenomena." In Proceedings of the…