Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

This article investigates near-native grammars at the syntax--discourse interface by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of two different domains of object movement in Dutch, which exhibit syntax-discourse or syntax-semantics level properties. English and German near-native speakers of Dutch, where German but not English allows the same…

Over the past several decades, researchers have discovered a great deal of information about the processes underlying language acquisition. From as early as they can be studied, infants are sensitive to the nuances of native-language sound structure. Similarly, infants are attuned to the visual and conceptual structure of their environments…

The present study implemented a sign-repetition task at two points in time to hearing adult learners of British Sign Language and explored how each phonological parameter, sign complexity, and iconicity affected sign production over an 11-week (22-hour) instructional period. The results show that training improves articulation accuracy and that…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of…

According to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English 1999 by Biber et al. (p. 266) generic article uses are more than twice as common in academic English than in conversation or fiction. This is an area that English for Academic Purpose (EPA) textbooks and teachers would need to target more than general English teaching. This paper is…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

The present study explores knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender in both comprehension and production by heritage language speakers and second language (L2) learners, with native Spanish speakers as a baseline. Most L2 research has tended to interpret morphosyntactic variability in interlanguage production, such as errors in gender agreement, as…

Examination of factors underlying cross-language transfer in metaphor interpretation among bilingual (Spanish-English) 7- to 12-year-olds indicated that metaphor interpretation ability was higher in the older subjects. The level of metaphor interpretation was most strongly related to cognitive-developmental variables that were interdependent…

This paper proposes a hypothesis for the interpretation of tense in English from the viewpoint of how the conception of time is reflected in linguistic temporal expressions. The hypothesis is then verified in light of acquisition data. The paper claims that following from the analysis of the conception of time in Section 2, three temporal…