Converging evidence suggests that understanding our first-language (L1) results in reactivation of experiential sensorimotor traces in the brain. Surprisingly, little is known regarding the involvement of these processes during second-language (L2) processing. Participants saw L1 or L2 words referring to entities with a typical location (e.g., star, mole) (Experiment 1 & 2) or to an emotion (e....

Functional connectivity changes in the language network (Price, 2010), and in a control network involved in second language (L2) processing (Abutalebi & Green, 2007) were examined in a group of Persian (L1) speakers learning French (L2) words. Measures of network integration that characterize the global integrative state of a network (Marrelec, Bellec et al., 2008) were gathered, in the shallow...

This work explores development in the perception of Japanese singleton and geminate consonant contrasts among native speakers of English learning Japanese as a second language. The primary goal of this paper is to show that the second language (L2) acquisition of phoneme contrasts that are not present in the first language (L1) exhibits development that is predictable from the acoustic properti...

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...

Second language learning is increasingly important in the modern world. Second language learners often wonder why they have experienced so many difficulties when learning a second language, while they did not experience it when learning a first language. This study aimed to discover a way in which the second language learning can benefit from the first language learning. A random sample of 50 s...

The present study investigated the relationships among willingness to communicate, communication apprehension, and self-perceived communication competence in Persian (L1) versus English (L2). A total number of 235 adult native Persian EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling to participate in the study. The population consisted of 118 intermediate learners and 113 upper-intermedi...

This study investigates the depth of lexical knowledge in first language (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners in reference to hierarchical word knowledge. Eighty-eight participants took part in a lexical decision task that assessed their speed and accuracy in recognizing words and nonwords. Prime and target pairs in the lexical decision task were related words (hyponynm to hypernym a...

multiple intelligences (mi), second/foreign (l2) proficiency and gender are postulated to contribute to language learning strategies (lls). this study, first, examined whether there was any relationship between iranian efl learners’ lls, on the one hand, and their mi, l2 proficiency, on the other hand. in so doing, it explored the relationship of the overall l2 strategy as well as individual st...

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...