The  present study aims at exploring the processing difficulty of cleft structures as a type of relative clause for EFL and Persian as  first language learners.The impact of head nouns with various functions as well as that of embedding on the processing of Persian and English cleft structures has been investigated in the present study.The participants  were 68  Iranian male and female students...

We revisit morpheme studies to evaluate the long-standing claim for a universal order of acquisition. We investigate the L2 acquisition order of six English grammatical morphemes by learners from seven L1 groups across five proficiency levels. Data are drawn from approximately 10,000 written exam scripts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The study establishes clear L1 influence on the absolute...

In this paper we report a longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that tested contrasting predictions about the time course of cognitive control in second language (L2) acquisition. We examined the neural correlates of lexical processing in L2 learners twice over the course of one academic year. Specifically, while in the scanner, participants were asked to judge the lan...

Visual information from the lips and face is an integral part of speech perception. In addition, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in foreign/second language (L2) perception and production. The current study investigates the effect of auditory and visual speech information and orthographic depth, the degree to which a language is transparent (high phoneme-grapheme ...

Previous research has provided evidence that mental imagery and embodied action can facilitate word learning in a novel language. However, it is unclear how these factors interact— as well as why they play a role—in word learning. Through a set of four experiments, this research demonstrated that neither mental imagery nor embodied action directly promotes the acquisition of second language (L2...

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI groups, and whether they would fit an (Extended) ...

Previous research has demonstrated that age of acquisition (AOA) plays an important role in L2 phonological acquisition. However, it is not clear why such AOA effects occur. Researchers have hypothesized that these effects may be explained by social (such as identification with L1/L2 culture), cognitive (ability to imitate, working and phonological memory capacity), and experiential (length of ...