In recent years the Critical Period Hypothesis of language acquisition has come under close scrutiny. The premise that native-like language proficiency can only be attained if the language is learned early in life seems difficult to maintain, as neuroimaging data have revealed a greater plasticity of the human brain to master new languages than has previously been assumed. The field of non-path...

This study presents cross-sectional data on adjectival agreement in second-language (L2) learners of Norwegian with four different first languages (L1s). The target language has full noun phrase between article, adjective and noun, the source represent conditions, similar to or from language. Sixteen participated study, their oral production was analysed individually. Two hypotheses were propos...

Assimilatory phonetic drift in L1 has been shown to occur in early second language learners when separate L2 categories have not been established. The direction and likelihood of drift is affected by degree of L1:L2 difference [2], and the need to maintain L1 distinctions [10]. We assessed the impact of explicit L2 phonetic training on L1:L2 interaction when novel L2 sounds could lead to a more...

The paper deals with the features of teaching of profession-related texts reading in a foreign language to bilingual students in agricultural higher education institution. Article’s purpose was to analyze the technology of intercultural competence formation by means of profession-related texts reading. The method of intercultural competence formation included using the profession-related texts ...

Abstract The role of EFL lecturers’ first language (L1) in the EFL courses has been an ongoing debate. A monolingual approach to EFL suggests that the use of the target language solely in foreign language (FL) classroom improves learning of the target language. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the attitude of Iranian lecturers and EFL learners towards using L1 as...

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody on their intonation of Japanese sentences. The second language (L2) intonation is a complicated product of the L1 transfer at two levels of prosodic hierarchy: at word level and at phrase levels. L2 speech is hypothesized to retain the characteris...

The time course of cross-script translation priming and repetition priming was examined in two different scripts using a combination of the masked priming paradigm with the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). Japanese-English bilinguals performed a semantic categorization task in their second language (L2) English and in their first language (L1) Japanese. Targets were preceded by a v...

To investigate whether second language processing is characterized by the same sensitivity to the emotional content of language - as compared to native language processing - we conducted an EEG study manipulating word emotional valence in a visual lexical decision task. Two groups of late bilinguals - native speakers of German and Spanish with sufficient proficiency in their respective second l...

Studies of proficient second-language (L2) learners have often noted phonetic drift of their native language (L1) vis-à-vis monolingual norms. Such drift has been attributed to perceptual linkage between similar sounds in L1 and L2. This study provides evidence that L1 phonetic drift is limited neither to advanced L2 learners, nor to crosslanguage influence at a segmental level. During the firs...