The current study investigates second language acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis to probe the development of features transferred from learners' native language without robust confirming or disconfirming evidence in the second language (L2) input. It is argued that Chinese allows object ellipsis licensed by a verb with a [VCase] feature but…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

This study proposes an explanatory account for the developmental stages of the acquisition of ser and estar in locative constructions. We propose that this copular distribution is regulated by two aspectual features, "dynamicity" and "temporal boundedness." These features are crucial for the interpretation of nominals such as…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

This article reports on an empirical study on the acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers ("zai," "-zhe[subscript P]" and "-zhe[subscript R]") by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels. Compared to English, Chinese has a richer imperfective aspect in terms of markers (forms) and features (meanings).…

Interface properties have been found to exhibit protracted instability in advanced bilingualism and L2 learning (Sorace, 2000, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). This study examines the role of learning context in modulating this instability in an interface property, namely the interpretation of definite plurals in L2 Arabic. Generic readings in…

The present study aims to investigate the role of L1 transfer effects on L2 sentence processing strategies during the interpretation of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. The main body of the study is divided into two sections. The first section describes Experiment 1, which is designed to test the resolution of RC attachment ambiguities…

It is commonly believed that second language (L2) acquisition of lexical tones presents a major challenge for learners from nontonal language backgrounds. This belief is somewhat at odds with research that consistently shows beginning learners making quick gains through focused tone training, as well as research showing advanced learners achieving…

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…

An experiment investigated adult language learners' ability to develop fully integrated cognitive representations of a difficult second language (L2) morphosyntactic feature: the Korean honorific verbal affix "(u)si." Native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) latencies during a word-by-word self-paced reading comprehension task…

It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/-/u/ and mid /oe/-/[openo]/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task…

Construction grammar (CG) has been proposed as an adequate grammatical formalism for building intelligent language tutoring systems because it is highly compatible with the learning strategies observed in second language learning. Unfortunately, the lack of computational CG implementations has made it impossible in the past to corroborate these…

In order to identify the causes of inflectional variability in adult second-language (L2) acquisition, this study investigates lexical and syntactic aspects of gender processing in real-time L2 production and comprehension. Twenty advanced to near-native adult first language (L1) English speakers of L2 German and 20 native controls were tested in…

Describes two grammaticality judgment tasks--one in French and one in English--developed based on differences between the two languages vis-a-vis middle constructions. The tasks were administered to Anglopone and Francophone advanced and very advanced learners of their second language, and to unilingual groups with the same first languages.…