Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

Investigated whether topic-prominence transfer is a universal developmental stage or a transferable typology by analyzing the behavior of 46 native speakers of English learning Chinese, a subject-prominence (SP) language, as a second language. Results found that the learners displayed a process of systematically transferring English SP features to…

Testing of a second-language phonological acquisition model with four beginning learners of Spanish supported the claim that transfer processes decrease over time while developmental processes increase and then decrease. Analysis also revealed a hierarchical organization of processes in second-language acquisition and an interaction of the native…