This work investigates first-language (L1) influence on second-language (L2) acquisition of embedded aspect, comparing participants with homogeneous L1 background (Russian) in Greece (L2 Standard Modern Greek) and Cyprus (L2 Cypriot Greek), where verb complementation takes a finite form instead of an infinitival as in Russian. The focus of the experimental study is on those embedded sentential ...

The acquisition of a second language (L2) is clearly somehow different from that of a first language (L1): adult second language learners rarely (if ever) achieve the same native competence that children do learning their first language and, conversely, children never experience the degree of difficulty that L2 learners do. This disparity between L2 and L1 acquisition is perhaps most apparent w...

Speech of late bilinguals has frequently been described in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from the native language (L1) to the second language (L2), but CLI from the L2 to the L1 has received relatively little attention. This article addresses L2 attainment and L1 attrition in voicing systems through measures of voice onset time (VOT) in two groups of Dutch-German late bilinguals in ...

A persistent question in the SLA (second language acquisition) research concerns the status of the involvement of the native language (i.e. L1 transfer). Inquiry into the question has been made on the basis of a variety of linguistic frameworks, such as contrastive analysis (Lado, 1957), L2 (second language) generative parametric approach (Flynn, 1987; White, 1989; Schwartz, 1996), and the more...

This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus contains written productions from learners at all proficiency levels as well 6 native control ...

A computational framework for quantitative studies of sound acquisition in a second language is presented. The framework supports the exploration of issues such as the effect of the amount and type of exposure to L2 categories, interactions between L1 and L2 sound systems as well as L1 attrition. The model is illustrated by simulating a Chinese listener’s responses to English vowel-consonant-vo...

As the neural substrates of second language (L2) acquisition are largely unknown, they may or may not be similar to those of first language (L1) representation. We used functional imaging to examine whether training in the conjugation of English verbs from present to past tense alters brain activations in 13-year-old twins. A novel experimental design contrasted past tense verb identification a...

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was st...