Post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity is found in Beijing Mandarin and has been claimed not to easily transfer in language contact. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the presence of PFC in second language (L2) Mandarin as a function of learners’ language experience. Five groups of L2 Mandarin learners were investigated: older, midage and younger Quanzhou Southern Min lear...

Previous research in second language (L2) learning has shown that learners benefit greatly from focused training in their L2 (e.g., [5, 9]). The current study investigated whether or not the results of production training might differ according to learning environment, specifically whether or not learners in a non-immersion setting who have fewer opportunities to interact with native speakers m...

Given that this special issue is devoted to the acquisition and processing of inflectional morphology by second language (L2) learners, the question in the title may appear redundant. However, recent research on first language (L1) and L2 morphological processing has challenged basic assumptions about the status of inflectional morphology in linguistic processing that had long been taken for gr...

This study examines second language (L2) syntactic development in conjunction with the effects such development has on human judgments of writing quality (i.e., judgments of both overall writing proficiency and more fine-grained judgments of syntactic proficiency). Essays collected from 57 L2 learners in a longitudinal study were analyzed for growth and scoring patterns using syntactic complexi...

Speech recognition by second language (L2) learners in optimal and suboptimal conditions has been examined extensively with English as the target language in most previous studies. This study extended existing experimental protocols (Wang et al., 2013) to investigate Mandarin speech recognition by Japanese learners of Mandarin at two different levels (elementary vs. intermediate) of proficiency...

Silbert & de Jong (2007) investigated correlations between response bias and segment frequency in a number of previously published segment identification data sets. In general, bias tends to be positively correlated with frequency. When applied to second language (L2) learning, this pattern predicts biases toward identifying novel L2 categories as L1 categories, since the number of instances of...

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (n...

Second or foreign language (L2) learners’ development of interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) competence to understand and properly interpret utterances under certain social and cultural circumstances plays a pivotal role in the achievement of communicative competence. The current study was designed to explore the effects of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and asynchronous com...

this project investigates the relationship between lexical semantics and causative morphology in the acquisition of causative/inchoative-related verbs in english as a foreign language by iranian speakers. results of translation and picture judgment task show although l2 learners have largely acquired the correct lexico-syntactic classification of verbs in english, they were constrained by the m...