The present study examined effects of cross-linguistic overlap and language proficiency on bilingual parallel language activation. Recognition of cognates (e.g., English hen, German Henne) was compared to recognition of non-cognates (e.g., English bike, German Fahrrad) in English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals, and monolinguals. In an eye-tracking paradigm, participants identified...

This study attempted to investigate the relationship among learning strategy, autonomy and language proficiency of Chinese university EFL students. To achieve this objective, purposive sampling and cluster sampling methods were used to select 422 non-English major students as participants in three universities, Henan province, China. Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SIL...

We report three reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming lexical decision experiments that explore the following in relation to L1 activation during L2 processing: (1) the role of L2 proficiency, (2) the role of sentence context, and (3) the locus of L1 activations (orthographic vs. semantic). All experiments used German (L1) homonyms translated into English (L2) ...

tsimpli and dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (l2) acquisition after the critical period. in this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from persian speaking learners of english as an l2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (rps) as uniterpretable features. unlike english which does not allow rps, persian shows various b...

Functional imaging methods show differences in the pattern of cerebral activation associated with the subject's native language (L1) compared with a second language (L2). In a recent PET investigation on bilingualism we showed that auditory processing of stories in L1 (Italian) engages the temporal lobes and temporoparietal cortex more extensively than L2 (English). However, in that study the I...

This study examined whether language structure or language proficiency might influence students’ use of evaluative language in written reports, and whether instruction might improve students’ use of evaluative language. Reports in Japanese and in English written by second year Japanese university students, who had received instruction in academic discourse pertaining to critical evaluation, wer...

In surveys of third language acquisition (TLA) research, mixed results demonstrate that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the advantages and/or disadvantages of bilinguality on  TLA.  The  main  concern  of  the  present  study  was,  thus,  to  probe  the  probable  differences between  Persian  monolingual  and  Azeri-Persian  bilingual  learners  of  English  regarding  their...

the role of motivation and attitude in l2 learning and their relationship with kinds of orientation which is specific to the social context has been a point of investigation for decades. this study was conducted to find the kinds of orientation (english learning reasons) specific to the social milieu of iran on the one hand, and their relationship with rnotivation and the english language profi...

An enduring question in the study of second-language acquisition concerns the relative contributions of age of acquisition (AOA) and ultimate linguistic proficiency to neural organization for second-language processing. Several ERP and neuroimaging studies of second-language learners have found that neural organization for syntactic processing is sensitive to delays in second-language acquisiti...