The present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of L2 learners of English (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of English native speakers on English active and passive reduced relative clauses. Three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. Results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an ...

While both insight and divergent thinking tasks are used to study creativity, there are reasons to believe that the two may call upon very different mechanisms. To explore this hypothesis, we administered a verbal insight task (riddles) and a divergent thinking task (verbal fluency) to 16 native English speakers and 16 non-native English speakers after they underwent Transcranial Direct Current...

Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish around age 14 years. They were compared with native ...

It is notoriously difficult to evaluate L2 prosody objectively, since there is little consensus as to what constitutes a correct prosody for a given utterance. This presentation describes an automatic procedure which consists in comparing a non-native speakers production with 10 instances of the same utterance, taken from the OMProDat database, and read by native speakers. The pitch and relativ...

This study investigates the process of generalizing a learned sub-lexical contrast across speakers of different non-native accents of English. We examine the generalization of a novel cue (voicing-cued release) that is non-contrastive in English, but contrastive in the manipulated speech of our L2 speakers of English, to a speaker with the same or different L1 as our training speakers (Exp. 1)....