The current project investigated the extent to which several lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech—appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness, sense relations— interact to influence native speakers’ judgements of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness). Extemporaneous speech elicited from 40 French speakers of Englis...

Autism may lead to distorted speech production. Studies on clinical populations investigating phonological processes in first (L1) and second (L2) language indicate that a higher number of processes is applied in L2 because L2 is a more difficult linguistic context. We investigated phonological processes in a Polish speaking adolescent with moderate-functioning autism who had intermediate profi...

The latency of the brain response to semantic anomalies (N400 effect) has been found to be longer in a bilingual's second language (L2) than in their first language (L1) and/or to that seen in monolinguals. This has been explained in terms of late exposure to L2, although age of exposure and language proficiency are often highly correlated. We thus examined the relative contributions of these f...

Recent research has revealed that the way phonology is constructed during word production differs across languages. Dutch and English native speakers are suggested to incrementally insert phonemes into a metrical frame, whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables and Japanese speakers use a unit called the mora (often a CV cluster such as "ka" or "ki"). The present study is concerned with t...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

Literature is replete with the studies focusing on the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language receptive skills. However, the relationship between the aspects of vocabulary knowledge and productive skills in general, and the speaking performance in particular has remained scanty in the related literature. This paper examined the relationship between knowledge of L2 vocabulary size at di...

Research on spoken language bilinguals has shown that there is a significant relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy outcomes. The mechanism of SES as a predictor of literacy success has two competing explanations. One assumes a direct impact of SES on literacy through expanded opportunities to read and better maternal mediation of literacy activities; the other assumes an ...

This  study  examined  the  effects  of  individual  difference  (ID)  factors  on  changing  pragmatic abilities  among  L2  learners  of  English.  Participants  were  48  Japanese  EFL  students  in  an English-medium  university  in  Japan.  They  completed  a  pragmatic  speaking  test  (k=12)  that assessed  their  ability  to  produce  two  speech  acts:  requests  and  opinions,  in  hi...

english passive has always been regarded as a challenge by farsi-speaking efl learners. despite the presence of many linguistic and pedagogical approaches in studying and teaching english passive, there still appears to be a pedagogical gap facing farsi-speaking efl learners dealing with this construction. taking up the cognitive-construction grammar perspective, the present article aims to inv...

This study investigated the impact of Chinese ESL learners’ second language (L2) proficiency on English word recognition in a lexical decision task. The study focused on the interaction among one between-participant variable (L2 proficiency) and three within-participant variables (orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, and words/nonwords). ANOVA and two-tailed t-test indicated that:...