Second language learners of English often experience difficulties in English lexical stress perception because of prosodic transfer of their first language (L1). It has thus been hypothesized that the problem of Chinese learners with English stress arises from tonal transfer. However, little research has been devoted to the investigation of the phonetic details of second language (L2) stress pe...

The study of iconicity, defined as the direct relationship between a linguistic form and its referent, has gained momentum in recent years across a wide range of disciplines. In the spoken modality, there is abundant evidence showing that iconicity is a key factor that facilitates language acquisition. However, when we look at sign languages, which excel in the prevalence of iconic structures, ...

This position paper highlights the importance of suprasegmental training in secondary language (L2) acquisition. Suprasegmental features are manifested in terms of acoustic cues and convey important information about linguistic and information structures. Hence, L2 learners must harness appropriate suprasegmental productions for effective communication. However, this learning process is influen...

Growing evidence suggests that auditory processing ability may be a crucial determinant of language learning, including adult second (L2) speech learning. The current study tested 47 Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language students to examine the extent which two types processing, i.e., perceptual acuity and audio-motor integration, related improvements in comprehensibility nativelikeness L2 foll...

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody. 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. For each level, the typical error patterns were listed and described in terms of L2 acquisiti...

second language acquisition (sla) always happens when the learners live and have contact with the native speakers of a second language. although this study investigates learning english by ten native children of farsi, the authors try to simulate the second language acquisition environment. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language learning o...

In recent minimalist approaches to acquisition, there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of the lexicon in accounts of syntactic variation. This paper extends the view of lexical feature assembly and reassembly articulated by Lardiere into the open-class lexicon and into the realm of motion events. An original L1 experiment reveals that variation in the syntax of motion events wi...

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 ...

One of the objectives of investigating child second language acquisition (SLA) is to find out to what extent it is similar to first language (L1) acquisition. Assuming that L1 acquisition is guided by principles of Universal Grammar (UG), it is often thought that second language (L2) acquisition by children is of the same nature, as it seems so easy for young learners to acquire a foreign langu...

Vocabulary is an important component of language proficiency which provides the basis for learners’ performance in other skills. But, since vocabulary learning seems to be so demanding, learners tend to forget newly-learnt words quite soon. In order to identify vocabulary learning conditions which can produce a more lasting effect, this study investigated the effect of three kinds of gloss cond...