This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N +…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

This study investigates the processing of "wh"-dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition,…

Communication strategies interlocutors use to avoid or resolve potential problems in face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated interactions can facilitate English learners' second language acquisition (SLA) (Smith, 2003). Such strategies are beneficial because they encourage English learners to practice the second language (L2), learn vocabulary,…

This study investigates how L1-Korean L2-English learners perform with regard to articles in both explicit and implicit tasks. It also examines the role of L1-transfer from Korean demonstratives to English definites in L2 article production. 21 native English speakers and 27 adult intermediate L1-Korean L2-English learners were tested. The…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

This study investigates the perception of English ownership among multilingual students in Australian universities. Using qualitative interviews, it explores ownership through four aspects: expertise, inheritance, usage, and identification. The findings suggest that linguistic ownership is tied to language proficiency and self-identification as an…

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e.…

Upon acquiring or learning another language, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is an inevitable phenomenon with which a bilingual speaker lives. One key aspect of CLI is its bidirectionality, flowing between both the first (L1) and second languages (L2) mutually affecting each other. However, investigations of L1 CLI on L2 have dominated previous…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

We investigated how native and fluent users of English segment continuous speech and to what extent they use sound-related and structure-related cues. As suggested by the notion of multi-competence, L1 users are not seen as ideal models with perfect command of English, and L2 users not as lacking in competence. We wanted to see how language…

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers' use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers' sensitivity to cues "all" and "any" in scalar implicature (SI) computation for "some." This article and our experimental setup does…

This study examines types and characteristics of data collection tasks used in studies on scope ambiguity in English involving a universally quantified noun phrase and negation, and investigates any differences in comprehension patterns across studies using different tasks. Since Musolino's seminal 1998 study using a truth value judgment task,…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…