Formal and semantic overlap across languages plays an important role in bilingual language processing systems. In the present study, Japanese (first language; L1)-English (second language; L2) bilinguals rated 193 Japanese-English word pairs, including cognates and noncognates, in terms of phonological and semantic similarity. We show that the degree of cross-linguistic overlap varies, such tha...

Adult second language (L2) learners are faced with a particular challenge relative to child L2 learners—adults arrive at the language learning situation with a fully-formed and ingrained first language (L1) system in place. As a result, adult learners are particularly influenced by the transfer of information from L1 to L2 (e.g., MacWhinney, 2005). Although transfer assists learning in some dom...

This paper investigates the influence of probabilistic information in the second language on the processing of English dative alternation constructions in German learners of English. We present two eye-tracking studies (visual world and reading) with evidence that the probabilistic patterns of the target language influence L2 processing when the initial preference is violated, and indications t...

In recent studies by Goad & White (2004, 2006a, in press) the acquisition of articles (the/a) by second language (L2) learners of English have been investigated. They claim that L2 learners from article-less languages such as Turkish and Chinese will have difficulty in prosodically representing articles in spoken production due to first language (L1) prosodic transfer i.e. no prosodic structure...

Readability is defined as the “comprehensibility of written text” [2,3]. It has been measured by various formulae developed for materials written for native speakers of a language (L1), or materials designed for second and/or foreign language students (L2). According to Brown et al. [4], being used with L1 texts, readability formulae provide a numerical index that estimates the reading difficul...

In bilinguals, native (L1) and second (L2) languages are processed by the same neural resources that can be modulated by age of second language acquisition (AOA), proficiency level, and daily language exposure and usage. AOA seems to particularly affect grammar processing, where a complete neural convergence has been shown only in bilinguals with parallel language acquisition from birth. Despit...

Given that Mandarin is a verb-serializing language, Russian a satellite-framed language, and Spanish a verb-framed language, the current study examines Mandarin college students’ acquisition of Russian and Spanish as L2, to understand the strength of L1 preferences for expression of PATH on Russian and Spanish majors’ second language acquisition in Taiwan. Based on oral narrative data, the stud...

1.1 Disfluencies in L2 speech For most of us, speaking a second language (L2) is a challenging task. Even if we call ourselves ‘fluent’ in the L2, we may at times find ourselves unsure about the grammar or at a loss for the right words. In fact, we are often not so fluent at all. The most obvious reason for this lack of fluency is a lack of proficiency, that is, a speaker has insufficient knowl...

A controversial issue in bilingual research is whether in the early stages of L2 learning, access to the conceptual system involves mediation of L1 lexical representations [Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149-174] or a dir...