The purpose of this study was to explore five developmental patterns of English letter-name knowledge for emergent bilingual children. We considered five patterns demonstrated by English monolingual children: visual similarity effect, uppercase familiarity effect, first name/first initial effects, consonant-order effect, and frequency effect. We…

While studies have shown that additional language (Lx) learners build on knowledge of previously acquired languages (Ringbom 2007), the natural interaction between languages is rarely exploited in Lx classrooms. This study explores the nature of metalinguistic reflections and crosslinguistic connections during plurilingual consciousness-raising…

The effect of first language transfer on second language acquisition and learning has been a major theoretical concept in second language research and pedagogy since the 1950s. In order to give a historical perspective, the authors offer a brief presentation of some of the major topics from the broad spectrum of issues that have been examined by…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

As Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2012, 2016), it provides a unique lens through which to observe the extent of first-language (L1) typological influence in second language (L2) acquisition of motion expressions. This study has dual purposes. First, it extends Wu's (2016) investigation on motion…

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…

In second language learning research, L1-L2 congruency refers to the similarity in form and meaning of the way a word or phrase is said between two languages. If there is low L1-L2 congruency, the learning burden of a word or phrase can be higher, and thus, such items should be focused on more in teaching to help learners avoid errors. For…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

This study presents a list of 2022 Bulgarian-Turkish cognate words that can be used to facilitate vocabulary acquisition and cross-linguistic awareness. The list was created manually through a multi-step process that involved scanning the database of an online dictionary to identify Bulgarian words that had the same or similar forms in Turkish.…

Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

In the past decades, there has been a surge in interest in the study of language complexity in second language (L2) research. In this article we provide an overview of current theoretical and methodological practices in L2 complexity research, while simultaneously framing these within the broader scientific interest into the notion of complexity.…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

Research on second language (L2) pronoun use in null-argument languages has traditionally focused on whether or not a speaker's first language (L1) also allows null pronouns. However, recent studies have pointed out that it is equally important to consider the specific linguistic properties of overt pronouns in the L1 and L2, which may differ even…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…