The mapping of lexical form to meaning is an important part of vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). This study examines the proposition that L2 lexical forms are often mapped to the existing semantic content of their first language (L1) translations rather than to new semantic specifications of their own. Native and nonnative English speakers were asked to perform two semantic judg...

Native speakers of a lexical accent system (Russians) were tested on their second language (L2) acquisition of a phonological stress system (Polish). In Russian, a sizeable part of the lexicon is underlyingly marked for accents and claims on the position of default stress vary. This makes it interesting to investigate which L1 characteristics (distribution of lexical accents vs. phonological de...

Reading picture books in the first language (L1) before rereading them second (L2) is assumed to be beneficial for young dual learners (DLLs). This pilot study examined how sharing digital L1 or L2 at home reading kindergarten affected book-specific vocabulary learning and story comprehension. Participants were 14 three- four-year-old children who spoke Polish learned Norwegian as their languag...

Title of Document: VALIDATING A THEORY-BASED MODEL OF L2 READING COMPREHENSION: RELATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS OF CONTENT-SPECIFIC SCHEMATIC KNOWLEDGE AND L2 VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE TO COMPREHENDING A SCIENCE TEXT Eunjou Oh, Ph.D., 2010 Directed By: Professor Peter Afflerbach, Department of Curriculum and Instruction Professor Robert Mislevy, Department of Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation The study...

This study examined whether late-learning English-German L2 learners and late-learning German-English L2 learners use prosodic cues to disambiguate temporarily ambiguous L1 and L2 sentences during speech production. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that English-German L2 learners and German-English L2 learners used a pitch rise and pitch accent to disambiguate prepositional phrase-attachment senten...

Three experiments with rat subjects examined resurgence of an extinguished instrumental response using the procedure introduced by Epstein (1983) with pigeons. There were three phases: (1) initial acquisition of pressing on a lever (L1) for pellet reward, (2) extinction of L1, and (3) a test session in which a second lever (L2) was inserted, briefly reinforced, and then extinguished. Experiment...

In recent studies by Goad & White (2004, 2006a, in press) the acquisition of articles (the/a) by second language (L2) learners of English have been investigated. They claim that L2 learners from article-less languages such as Turkish and Chinese will have difficulty in prosodically representing articles in spoken production due to first language (L1) prosodic transfer i.e. no prosodic structure...

The paper discusses the history and implications of the so-called “morpheme” studies. A brief overview of L1 research in this regard is followed by a more detailed discussion of L2 research. Thereafter, the paper explores the impact of three putative determinants of acquisition order: semantic complexity, input frequency, and native language transfer. The possible role of these determinants in ...

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (ma...

Recently, it has been shown that a number of hydroxypyridinones such as 1,2-dimethyl-3-hydroxypyridin-4-one (L1) are useful for the treatment of iron overload in place of desferrioxamine in thalassaemic patients. In this study, the intestinal absorption (I.A.) of L1 and one of its analogues namely 2-methy-3-hydroxypyridin-4-one (L2), which possesses a higher partition coefficient (Kpart) than L...