The study of second language acquisition (SLA) is often hindered by substantial variability in the background of learners, their learning process and the input they receive. This diversity often makes it difficult to isolate specific learning factors and study their impact on L2 development. We present a computational study of SLA as an alternative methodological approach. By applying a usage-b...

This paper focuses on a parametric difference between French and English, namely the verb movement parameter. Previous re-search shows that verb-raising in causes learnability problems for Anglophone learners. Because of raising French, an adverb may be placed its direct object, allowing subject-verb-adverb-object (S-V-Adv-O) structure. However, lack prohibits S-V-Adv-O structure English. The a...

A fundamental question in multilingualism is whether the neural substrates are shared or segregated for the two or more languages spoken by polyglots. This study employs functional MRI to investigate the neural substrates underlying the perception of two sentence-level prosodic phenomena that occur in both Mandarin Chinese (L1) and English (L2): sentence focus (sentence-initial vs. -final posit...

Structure building in language acquisition involves the adding of successive nodes in a hierarchical structure; its application is seen in the realm of syntax for both L1 (e.g. Clahsen, Penke & Parodi, 1993; Vainikka, 1993) and L2 acquisition (e.g. Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996), and to some extent within phonology as well (Brown, 1997). Although researchers in morphological theory argu...

This work addresses an important current issue in the field of second language speech acquisition. The main purpose of the experiments reported here has been to test a hypothesis about the influence of L1 phonology on the acquisition of contrastive L2 phonetic categories. This hypothesis holds that an L2 contrastive category will be difficult to acquire if it is based on a phonetic feature not ...

This study examined the relation between long-term music training and child development based on 250 Chinese elementary school students' academic development of first language (L1), second language (L2), and mathematics. We found that musician children outperformed non-musician children only on musical achievement and second language development. Additionally, although music training appeared t...

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) sp...

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...

Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

This paper sought to determine whether L1 vowel inventory size could be a contributing factor to the use of temporal cues in L2 vowel perception. The participants were L1 Catalan (n=20) and L1 Danish (n=20) EFL learners and L1 English control group (n=7). We hypothesized that the smaller vowel inventory of Catalan could result in difficulties in discerning spectral di...