Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

With the increasing consensus that a single effect of bilingualism is unlikely, some scholars shift their focus to elements that may exert an influence on the bilingual brain. One such element that has been garnering attention lately concerns the role of L1-L2 typological distance. In this conceptual analysis, I make the case that the foundations…

Motion is a universal concept in common human perception. In the word system of a language, verb is inherently a very complex real word, both in terms of grammar and semantics, that complexity is due to the influence of the semantics of this word. However, in most of the previous studies, the authors often only focused on studying single word…

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…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis has focused on the influence of grammar in language on speakers' cognition. Previous studies show that speakers of languages with grammatical number (e.g., English) are more aware of the number of objects. Additionally, recent studies reveal that bilinguals who speak languages with different grammatical…

The functioning of any language is regulated not only by linguistic rules, but also by norms of social and cultural life. Nowadays, development of lingua cultural approach in worldwide education is conditioned by a re-construal of culture phenomena as a specific form of human existence. Until now, we have been dealing with an absence of sufficient…

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…

aaaPlural marking differs across languages. Some must mark plurality using an overt morpheme (e.g. English, Russian), while others mark it optionally (e.g. Korean) or lack an explicit plural morpheme (e.g. Chinese). This crosslinguistic difference in plural marking has received much attention in research exploring language transfer in the context…

This study investigates pronoun interpretation by second language (L2) learners of English, focusing on whether first language (L1) transfer and/or processing difficulty affect L2 learners' pronoun resolution. It is hypothesized that L2 learners' non-target performance in L2-pronoun interpretation is attributable to two sources. The first is the…

This study investigates the hypothesis that non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings pose a greater challenge for non-native (L2) than for native (L1) speakers, focusing on a previously understudied phenomenon. We carried out an antecedent judgment task with L1 German and L1 Russian-speaking, proficient L2 learners of German to examine Condition C…

This commentary discusses the recent keynote article in "Second Language Research" by Westergaard (2021), which extends the Micro-cue Model to second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary comments on such questions as: What makes a given property easy or hard to acquire? How do learners determine similarity?…