This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach--combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data--in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis…

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals' two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we…

To investigate potential causes of L2 performance deficits that correlate with age of onset, we use a computational model to explore the individual contributions of L1 entrenchment and aspects of memory development. Since development and L1 entrenchment almost invariably coincide, studying them independently is seldom possible in humans. To avoid…

Current research on bilingual aphasia highlights the paucity in recommendations for optimal rehabilitation for bilingual aphasic patients (Edmonds & Kiran, 2006; Roberts & Kiran, 2007). In this paper, we have developed a computational model to simulate an English-Spanish bilingual language system in which language representations can vary by age…

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)-S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish-L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces:…

In the present study, we explore whether multiple data sources may be more effective than single sources at predicting the words that language learners are likely to know. Second language researchers have hypothesized that there is a relationship between word frequency and the likelihood that words will be encountered or used by second language…

This essay by Truscott and Sharwood-Smith is a valiant attempt with a laudable goal. It seeks to show how different perspectives and disciplines can capture what is happening in acquisition and notably in L2 acquisition. Nonetheless, I think that the results are much closer to an elaborated grammatical theory than an elaborated processing theory…