Converging evidence suggests that understanding our first-language (L1) results in reactivation of experiential sensorimotor traces in the brain. Surprisingly, little is known regarding the involvement of these processes during second-language (L2) processing. Participants saw L1 or L2 words referring to entities with a typical location (e.g., star, mole) (Experiment 1 & 2) or to an emotion (e....

The present study investigated how learners’ knowledge of a second language (L2) can influence the processing of their first language (L1). The study recorded the eye movements of 47 L1 Chinese participants with different L2 English proficiency levels as they read and judged the grammaticality of 240 Chinese sentences (60 anglicized ungrammatical relative clauses, 90 non-anglicized ungrammatica...

During the last two decades, bilingual research has adopted the masked translation priming paradigm as a tool to investigate the architecture of the bilingual language system. Although there is now a consensus about the existence of forward translation priming (from native language primes (L1) to second language (L2) translation equivalent targets), the backward translation priming effect (from...

Speaker accent influences the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Knowledge of accent-based acoustic variations can therefore be used in the development of more robust systems. This paper investigates the differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) English in South Africa and is specifically aimed at L2 English speakers with a native African mother tongu...

The present study examines the effects of 3 kinds of glosses—first-language (L1) Chinese glosses plus second-language (L2) English example sentences, L1 in-text glosses, and L1 marginal glosses—in comparison with a no-gloss condition in reading an English passage, to explore whether providing glosses can facilitate reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. A total of 135 undergraduate b...

Native Language Identification (NLI), which tries to identify the native language (L1) of a second language learner based on their writings, is helpful for advancing second language learning and authorship profiling in forensic linguistics. With the availability of relevant data resources, much work has been done to explore the native language of a foreign language learner. In this report, we p...

Native listeners adapt to noncanonically produced speech by retuning phoneme boundaries by means of lexical knowledge. We asked whether a second language lexicon can also guide category retuning and whether perceptual learning transfers from a second language (L2) to the native language (L1). During a Dutch lexical-decision task, German and Dutch listeners were exposed to unusual pronunciation ...

Bilinguals who have acquired both of their languages simultaneously since birth or learned first language (L1) and second (L2) sequentially, as children adults, are able to produce perceive two different sound systems [...]

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repet...