Background: The P600 brain wave reflects syntactic processes in response to different first language (L1) syntactic violations, syntactic repair, structural reanalysis, and specific semantic components. Unlike semantic processing, aspects of the second language (L2) syntactic processing differ from the L1, particularly at lower levels of proficiency. At higher L2 proficiency, syntactic violatio...

It is generally agreed upon that, in first language (L1) acquisition, the child, provided with ample primary linguistic data, relies on a Universal Grammar (UG) from which it selects the functional categories and features necessary to parse the input. Although the learning task for adult second language (L2) learners is not necessarily different from that of the L1 child, important differences,...

Functional imaging methods show differences in the pattern of cerebral activation associated with the subject's native language (L1) compared with a second language (L2). In a recent PET investigation on bilingualism we showed that auditory processing of stories in L1 (Italian) engages the temporal lobes and temporoparietal cortex more extensively than L2 (English). However, in that study the I...

Grammatical gender presents persistent difficulty for adult learners of Spanish in L2 acquisition; however, there is a literature gap L3 acquisition gender, specifically typologically different languages. In this project, we investigate the agreement by Russian (L1)/Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) speakers (L3) and compare findings with English(L1) (L2). Studying these languages particularly interes...

This study investigated the interaction of the L1 and L2 systems in bilinguals by assessing the e!ect of L1 use on L1 and L2 production accuracy. A novel design feature of this study is that it examined bilinguals who used their L1 on a regular basis in a bilingual setting: Otavalo, Ecuador. Thirty native Quichua speakers who were matched for age of Spanish acquisition were recruited to form th...

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...

Third language (L3) acquisition differs from first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. There are different views on whether L1 or L2 is of primary influence on L3 acquisition in terms of transfer. This study examines differences in the event-related brain potentials (ERP) response to agreement incongruencies between L1 Spanish speakers and L3 Spanish learners, comparing response...

This study investigated how various child-internal and child-external factors predict English L2 children’s acquisition outcomes for vocabulary size and accuracy with verb morphology. The children who participated (N=169) were between 4;10 and 7;0 years old (mean = 5;10), had between 3 to 62 months of exposure to English (mean = 20 months), and were from newcomer families to Canada. Results sho...