How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

Traditionally, transfer is described as interference and consequently as an unintentional mechanism. More recently, however, the perception of control in transfer has changed and it is now commonly accepted that transfer can occur both automatically and strategically. Studies have previously employed think-aloud protocols during writing tasks to…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean.…

This paper compares the initial state of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition for English articles to examine the influence of L2 proficiency on positive transfer from L2 to L3. We tested 36 L1 Turkish/L2 German adolescent learners of L3 English (L3 group), 41 L1 Turkish adolescent learners of L2 English (L2 group), and 10…

Producing a sensible utterance requires speakers to select conceptual content, lexical items, and syntactic structures almost instantaneously during speech planning. Each language offers its speakers flexibility in the selection of lexical and syntactic options to talk about the same scenarios involving movement. Languages also vary typologically…

This paper explores whether language typology plays any role in lexical availability and spelling accuracy in L2 English. Two groups of adult speakers were compared: a group of native speakers of a language typologically distant from English with a logographic writing system (Chinese; n = 13) vs. a group of native speakers of a language…