Bilingual speakers are confronted with a unique challenge when learning language as they must learn to express the same concept in two separate languages. Here, we examine whether learning number words in one language (i.e., L1) facilitates the acquisition of analogous number words in a second language (i.e., L2) or whether extensive experience and familiarity with numbers within the second lan...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess inter-subject variability in the cortical representation of language comprehension processes. Moderately fluent French-English bilinguals were scanned while they listened to stories in their first language (L1 = French) or in a second language (L2 = English) acquired at school after the age of seven. In all subjects, listening to L1 alway...

the meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. however, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of english...

The authors examine the degree to which first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of English are able to distinguish between simplified or authentic reading texts from L2 instructional books and whether L1 and L2 speakers differ in their ability to process linguistic cues related to this distinction. These human judgments are also compared to computational judgments which are based on indice...

The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...

We examined how words from bilingual toddlers' second language (L2) primed recognition of related target words in their first language (L1). On critical trials, prime-target word pairs were either (a) phonologically related, with L2 primes overlapped phonologically with L1 target words [e.g., slide (L2 prime)-Kleid (L1 target, "dress")], or (b) phonologically related through translation, with L...

This study investigated semantic transfer in second language (L2) learning and provided a replication of the author’s study (Jiang, 2002) in a different English as a Second Language (ESL) population. Korean ESL speakers were asked to perform a semantic judgment task in which they decided whether or not 2 English words were related in meaning. Two types of related word pairs served as critical s...