Numerous studies have shown that the native language influences foreign word recognition and that this influence is modulated by the proficiency in the non-native language. Here we explored how the degree of reliance on cross-language similarity (as measured by the cognate facilitation effect) together with other domain-general cognitive factors contribute to reading comprehension achievement i...

Native-language identification is the task of determining a speaker’s native language based only on their speeches in a second language. In this paper we propose the use of the wellknown i-vector representation of the speech signal to detect the native language of an English speaker. The i-vector representation has shown an excellent performance on the quite similar task of distinguishing betwe...

We generate a native pattern language from a context-free grammar. So if we have the underlying grammar of code that needs to be analyzed, or renovated the pattern language comes for free. We use native patterns for recognition and renovation of code. The pattern language is global in the sense that patterns can match entire programs. We illustrate native patterns by discussing a tool that reme...

BACKGROUND With the adoption of the English language in medical education, a gap in clinical communication may develop in countries where the native language is different from the language of medical education. This study investigates the association between medical education in a foreign language and students' confidence in their history-taking skills in their native language. METHODS This c...

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, or priming) to examine three domains of morphological processing (regular and irregular inflect...

We investigated the effects of non-native language (English) exposure on event-related potentials (ERPs) in first- and second-year (four- and five-year-old) preschool Japanese native speakers while they listened to semantically congruent and incongruent Japanese sentences. The children were divided into a non-native language exposed group (exposed group) and a group without such experiences (co...

Bilingual listeners comprehend speech-in-noise better in their native than non-native language. This native-language benefit is thought to arise from greater use of top-down linguistic information to assist degraded speech comprehension. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recently showed that left angular gyrus activation is modulated when semantic context is used to assist native ...

After immersion in a foreign language, speakers often have difficulty retrieving native-language words--a phenomenon known as first-language attrition. We propose that first-language attrition arises in part from the suppression of native-language phonology during second-language use, and thus is a case of phonological retrieval-induced forgetting. In two experiments, we investigated this hypot...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the process of identifying the native language of non-native speakers based on their speech or writing. It has several applications namely authorship profiling and identification, forensic analysis, second language identification, and educational applications. English is one of the prominent language used by most of the non-English people in the world. Th...