In the present study, we investigate how early and late L2 learners process L2 grammatical traits that are either present or absent in their native language (L1). Thirteen early (AoA = 4 years old) and 13 late (AoA = 18 years old) Spanish learners of Basque performed a grammatical judgment task on auditory Basque sentences while their event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The sen...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

In this paper, we evaluate the adequacy of two widely used machine learning algorithms and a computational linguistic proposal to model L2 perceptual development. The three proposals are, in order, Nearest Neighbor, Naive Bayesian and Stochastic OT and the Gradual Learning Algorithm. We compared the three models’ outputs to those of Spanish learners of Dutch who were asked to categorize synthet...

This study examined how two segmental or sound-related factors (crosslanguage perceptual similarity, syllabic context) as well as two lexical or wordrelated factors (word frequency, subjective word familiarity) influenced the production of eight English vowels by 40 Korean children and adults exposed to English in the U.S. for an average of 1 and 7 years. Results of two experiments revealed tha...

With over a decade of fruitful Universal Grammar (UG)-based research in second language acquisition (SLA), White (in press) suggests that "...perhaps the time has come to stop asking the broad question: is UG available to second language (L2) learners or not? ... but it is now the turn of a somewhat more detailed focus on the precise nature of the linguistic competence of language learners". Th...

For native speakers, many studies suggest a link between oscillatory neural activity in the beta frequency range and syntactic processing. For late second language (L2) learners on the other hand, the extent to which the neural architecture supporting syntactic processing is similar to or different from that of native speakers is still unclear. In a series of four experiments, we used electroen...

Phonological rules introduce variation in word forms that listeners have to compensate for. We previously showed (Darcy 2002; Darcy et al., to appear) that compensation for phonological variation in perception is driven by languagespecific mechanisms. In particular, English speakers compensate more for place assimilation than for voicing assimilation, whereas the reverse holds for French speake...

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...

This study investigated the impact of Chinese ESL learners’ second language (L2) proficiency on English word recognition in a lexical decision task. The study focused on the interaction among one between-participant variable (L2 proficiency) and three within-participant variables (orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, and words/nonwords). ANOVA and two-tailed t-test indicated that:...