When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

Technological advances have made the ability to translate no longer exclusively belong to humans. Today, machine translation has turned into a tool with superior performance to convert text between languages without the need for human intervention. One of the translation research foci is the studies of causative translation, especially from…

The fluency of second language (L2) speech can be influenced by L2 proficiency, but also by differences in the efficiency of cognitive operations and personal speaking styles. The nature of cognitive fluency is still, however, little understood. Therefore, we studied the cognitive fluency of Finnish advanced students of English (N = 64) to…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…

This article delves into the challenges and considerations surrounding the translation of mathematical logic texts, emphasizing its linguistic aspects and the relevance of its sublanguage nature in scientific discourse. By examining translations across English-Kazakh languages, the study aimed to uncover shared features and divergences,…

Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

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…

We investigated the role of cue weighting, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 daily exposure in L2 learning of suprasegmentals different from the first language (L1), using eye-tracking. Spanish monolinguals, English-Spanish learners, and Mandarin--Spanish learners saw a paroxytone and an oxytone verb (e.g., "FIRma-firMÓ"…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Adult second language learners arrive at the language learning situation with an already formed first language grammar system in place. The study of cross-language similarity across the first and second languages explores how the similarities and differences in the two languages make learning more or less difficult, particularly for adult…

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…

Corpus analysis methods have been widely employed in literary translation research by numerous scholars. However, their integration into literary translation training has yet to be developed. With the advancement of AI technology, this paper explores the potential of employing AI-enhanced corpus text analysis and text mining techniques in this…