This study investigates the acoustic realizations of English phonemic contrasts by Korean EFL learners, comparing their productions with those of native English speakers. Focusing on the segmentally correct production, the research aims to determine if Korean learners' acoustic properties align with those of native speakers, influenced by second…

There has been plenty of observational evidence displaying that L2 English learners whose L1 do not have article systems undergo persistent difficulties. It is known that functional categories of grammar are especially difficult for L2 learners, and the Korean language does not have a functional equivalent to English articles. The current study…

While anime is well-recognized as a significant motivator of Japanese language learners today, idol fandom, though served as an equally strong source of motivation for some learners, receives far less academic attention. This paper is a preliminary exploration of idol fandom's role in fueling the Japanese language-learning process. Through…

This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…

Every speaker of a native language undergoes an interlanguage continuum or the way that the language learners go through from the first to the second language. Interlanguage is an essential theory for teachers to know what goes on in the learning process. It makes the teachers look at the varieties of mistaken linguistic forms with an eye for…

This study investigated the relationship between language proficiency and negative pragmatic transfer from a first language (L1), focusing on the speech act of refusal as realised by American learners of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) in Egyptian Arabic. Twenty American AFL learners (10 intermediate and 10 advanced) and 2 baseline groups (10…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

Because the appearance of the passive construction varies cross linguistically, differences exist in the interlanguage (IL) passives attempted by learners of English. One such difference is the widely studied IL pseudo passive, as in "*new cars must keep inside" produced by Chinese speakers. The belief that this is a reflection of L1 language…