The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

The English past counterfactuality is difficult for non-native learners to learn and understand due to cross-language discrepancies. Oftentimes, individuals unavoidably develop the interlanguage and this language system becomes fossilized regardless of the amount of exposed time and input. The purpose of the study was twofold: (a) to examine 126…

We investigated how grapheme familiarity and grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) congruence affect adult learners' ability to make use of orthographic input (OI) during phono-lexical acquisition. Native English speakers, with no Russian experience (naïve) or learners of Russian, heard auditory forms, saw pictured meanings, and saw written input…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty with novel L2 phonological contrasts, limiting their ability to establish contrastive lexical representations of L2 words. It has been demonstrated that the availability of orthographic input (OI), and variables interacting with OI, can shape the inferences learners make about L2…

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect…

The interaction between input frequency and constructional interference receives little attention in second language (L2) research. Two studies were conducted to test the effect of this interaction. Study 1 examined effects of both Zipfian frequency (ZF) and balanced frequency (BF) on L2 learning of English subject-extracted relative clauses…

This study investigated the various linguistic, psychological, and sociocultural variables that explain the sociolinguistic variation in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) among Arab siblings. The variables are not predetermined but extracted from the participants' contributions and data in a grounded theory research. The siblings participated in…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…