Utilizing eye-tracking technology and focusing on the “rapid”, “purposeful” and “comprehending” attributes of fluent reading, this study investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers’ online reading patterns and comprehension. Eye movement data from nine L1 readers and nine L2 readers were collected, analyzed and compared. Post-experiment interviews were conducted to obtain ...

A large-scale study of 484 elementary school children (6-10 years) performing word repetition tasks in their native language (L1-Japanese) and a second language (L2-English) was conducted using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Three factors presumably associated with cortical activation, language (L1/L2), word frequency (high/low), and hemisphere (left/right), were investigated. L1 words ...

In a previous study of native-English speaking university learners of a second language (Spanish) we observed an asymmetric pattern of ERP translation priming effects in L1 and L2 (Alvarez et al., 2003, Brain & Language, 87, 290-304) with larger and earlier priming on the N400 component in the L2 to L1, compared with the L1 to L2 direction. In the current study 20 native-Russian speakers who we...

Introduction How human brains acquire second languages (L2) is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience and language science. However, it is unclear whether the first language (L1) has a cross-linguistic influence on the processing of L2. Methods Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activities during L2 word reading tasks of phonographic Japanese Kana bet...

Bilingualism or multilingualism is not the aberration supposed by those speaking a 'big language' but rather the default situation for the majority of speech communities in the world today. Based on this perspective, the psycholinguistic foundations of second language acquisition are explored in the first part of this paper and it is argued that bilingual education in a monolingual society shou...

We investigated whether language nonselective lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition when listening in the native language (L1) is modulated by (a) the semantic constraint of the sentence and (b) the second language (L2) proficiency level. We report 2 experiments in which Dutch-English bilinguals with different proficiency levels completed an L1 auditory lexical-decision task on ...

Abstract The present study investigated the use of apology response (AR) strategies by L1-Chinese L2-English learners and L1-English L2-Chinese from a cross-linguistic perspective. A total 18 Taiwanese college students who were learning English as foreign language foreigners in Taiwan Chinese second recruited to complete an oral discourse completion task both English. major findings are follows...

While many second language (L2) acquisition studies analyze the effects that the first language (L1) has on L2 development, less common are studies that examine the converse situation: does acquisition of an L2 impact the L1? This study examines the effects of L2 acquisition on L1 use by looking at the L1 phonological productions of advanced L2 learners vis-à-vis the production of monolingual s...

In this paper, we investigate a novel approach to correcting grammatical and lexical errors in texts written by second language authors. Contrary to previous approaches which tend to use unilingual models of the user's second language (L2), this new approach uses a simple roundtrip Machine Translation method which leverages information about both the author’s first (L1) and second languages. We...