A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER-SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that…

A growing body of research suggests that the writing ability of international second language learners (IL2) and US-resident second language learners, also referred to as Generation 1.5 (G1.5), differs, despite a dearth of substantial empirical evidence supporting such claims. The present study provides much-needed empirical evidence concerning…

We investigated reading and writing in two domestic languages (Swedish and Finnish) and one foreign language (English) among multilingual university students with (n = 20) versus without dyslexia (n = 20). Our analyses encompassed overall speed and accuracy measures and an in-depth analysis of grapheme-phoneme-grapheme errors and inflectional…

Spelling error corpora can be collected from students' written essays, homework, dictations, translations, tests and lecture notes. Spelling errors can be classified into whole word errors, faulty graphemes and faulty phonemes in which graphemes are deleted, added, reversed or substituted. They can be used for identifying phonological and…

The purpose of the study is to provide a guideline for the pedagogical approaches to teach Thai students the grammar of the Chinese adverbs "zai" and "you". Questionnaire results revealed that the reasons for the misuse of "zai" and "you" by Thai university students can be classified into three causes: (1) "zai" and "you" suggest repeatedness and…

Building up messages as a cognitive activity within the linguistic multi-level system is the result of the interaction between the various components of this system. Yet, this interactive process occurring in the language user's mind while encoding can vary from person to person. Likewise, it also differs in different recipients while decoding.…

Every article sent by an author to a reputed scientific journal undergoes a rigorous editorial evaluation. The editor has the final responsibility of accepting or rejecting manuscripts and thus can confer authority and validity on the author's research and help to disseminate new knowledge. In this task, editors make use of a panel of expert peer…

Existing research indicates that instructed learners' L2 proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge are moderately correlated. However, the operationalization of the construct of metalinguistic knowledge has varied somewhat across studies. Metalinguistic knowledge has typically been operationalized as learners' ability to correct, describe,…

In this study, we focus on particle errors and discuss an annotation scheme for Korean learner corpora that can be used to extract heuristic patterns of particle errors efficiently. We investigate different properties of particle errors so that they can be later used to identify learner errors automatically, and we provide resourceful annotation…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

The problem. The purpose of this study is to investigate positive and negative cross-linguistic transfer on EFL learners' phraseological competence in collocations and its relationship to learners' linguistic proficiency. Method. A quantitative study was conducted. Two instruments, multiple choice test and grammaticality judgment test, were…

Dutch-English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the…

For the majority of people in Ireland, Irish is a second language acquired primarily through the schooling system. This study examined the reading strategies children used in response to English and Irish words (presented in isolation), through an analysis of their oral reading errors. Children in their 4th year of schooling attending…

Communicative competence is the ultimate goal of most learners of a second language and intelligible pronunciation a fundamental part of it. Unfortunately, learners often lack the opportunity to explore how intelligible their speech is for different audiences. Our research investigates whether synchronous-voice computer-mediated communication…

In a project-based approach to teaching a foreign language at the university level, students are often required to participate in several task-based writing activities. In doing so, language learners not only write incorrect forms, but also correct forms of the same structures, both of which provide useful information on their strengths and…