While many second language (L2) acquisition studies analyze the effects that the first language (L1) has on L2 development, less common are studies that examine the converse situation: does acquisition of an L2 impact the L1? This study examines the effects of L2 acquisition on L1 use by looking at the L1 phonological productions of advanced L2 learners vis-à-vis the production of monolingual s...

In his seminal paper on the ‘fundamental difference’ between first and second language (L1 and L2) acquisition, Bley-Vroman (1990) proposed that this disparity is due to the lack of continued access to Universal Grammar and the unavailability of ‘domain-specific learning procedures’ beyond a critical period in child language development. He considered four possible alternative accounts of this ...

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI groups, and whether they would fit an (Extended) ...

The present study examines the coordination of lexical and paralinguistic F0 in second language (henceforth L2) production. We tested how L2 learners manage to handle F0 when F0 in their first language (henceforth L1) carries a paralinguistic function, but a lexical one in their L2 and vice versa. Participants (fifteen L1 Japanese speakers and fifteen L1 German speakers, proficient also in thei...

Introduction How human brains acquire second languages (L2) is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience and language science. However, it is unclear whether the first language (L1) has a cross-linguistic influence on the processing of L2. Methods Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activities during L2 word reading tasks of phonographic Japanese Kana bet...

In this paper, we validate Macaro’s (2006) model of strategy use among language learners by assessing the amount of neural activity around the prefrontal cortex, the supposed locus of working memory (WM). We also examine whether WM activation during first language (L1) strategy deployment is lower than WM activation during second language (L2) strategy deployment, as predicted by Macaro’s model...

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...

In this paper, we introduce block insertion and deletion on trajectories, which provide us with a new framework to study properties of language operations. With the parallel syntactical constraint provided by trajectories, these operations properly generalize several sequential as well as parallel binary language operations such as catenation, sequential insertion, k-insertion, parallel inserti...

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...

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...