A large number of studies have been carried out over the last few years investigating whether the neurological representation of language differs between first (L1) and second (L2) language. In a recent review, Stowe and Sabourin (2005) concluded that both L1 and L2 typically activate the same areas, particularly the typical language areas (i.e., that there is no consistent qualitative differen...

It is known that the left hemisphere of the human brain is critical in understanding and producing spoken language, but it remains a topic of great interest determining the cerebral lateralization of multiple languages. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of similarity between languages on hemispheric asymmetry of bilingual brains. The involvement degree of left and right hemisphere...

With the renewed interest in the field of second language learning for the knowledge of collocating words, research findings in favour of holistic processing of formulaic language could support the idea that these language units facilitate efficient language processing. This study investigated the difference between processing of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) of congruent col...

Adult second language (L2) learners are faced with a particular challenge relative to child L2 learners—adults arrive at the language learning situation with a fully-formed and ingrained first language (L1) system in place. As a result, adult learners are particularly influenced by the transfer of information from L1 to L2 (e.g., MacWhinney, 2005). Although transfer assists learning in some dom...

The present paper summarizes three experiments that investigate the effects of age of acquisition on first-language (L1) acquisition in relation to second-language (L2) outcome. The experiments use the unique acquisition situations of childhood deafness and sign language. The key factors controlled across the studies are age of L1 acquisition, the sensory–motor modality of the language, and lev...

Third language (L3) acquisition differs from first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. There are different views on whether L1 or L2 is of primary influence on L3 acquisition in terms of transfer. This study examines differences in the event-related brain potentials (ERP) response to agreement incongruencies between L1 Spanish speakers and L3 Spanish learners, comparing response...

In this paper, we evaluate for the first time the use of Machine Translation technology to repair general errors in second language (L2) authoring. Contrary to previously evaluated approaches which rely exclusively on unilingual models of L2, this method takes into account both languages, and is thus able to model linguistic interference phenomena where the author produces an erroneous word for...

Numerous studies have been conducted to ascertain the relationship between first language (L1) and second/foreign (L2). However, it is unclear how vowels consonants affect a foreign speaker pronounces Indonesian. Thus, objective of this study was Indonesian that were incorrectly correctly pronounced by Lao men Japanese women. This descriptive qualitative in nature. Following data collection via...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conc...