This paper investigates the claim that the native grammar of the learners is the initial state of second language acquisition, as far as the acquisition of Universal Grammar parameters is concerned. Two opposing views on L1 transfer are discussed: the first hypothesis maintains that learners start out with the L1 parameter value (Schwartz & Sprouse’s 1994, 1996 Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothe...

this study investigated iranian english language learners’ use of circumlocution for culture-specific referents. a discourse completion test (dct) was designed in english and persian, consisting of items dealing with iranian culture-specific notions and distributed among 3 groups. the persian language group received the persian version, whereas the english language learners, divided into high a...

Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental diff...

If one is to exploit the notion of interlanguage in error diagnosis systems, a precise definition of this concept is useful. We will define interlanguage set theoretically, on two different levels. A comparison of a first language and a target language on the X^-level makes it possible to compare structural similarity between languages, and a comparison on the Vx-level enables an explication of...

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian–English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence language interaction. More cross-linguistic borro...

We consider the problem of using a bilingual dictionary to transfer lexico-syntactic information from a resource-rich source language to a resource-poor target language. In contrast to past work that used bitexts to transfer analyses of specific sentences at the token level, we instead use features to transfer the behavior of words at a type level. In a discriminative dependency parsing framewo...

This study examines the impact of syntactic priming on production of indirect questions/requests by Persian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Eighty learners participated in two experiments investigating the impact of syntactic priming on oral production and the possibility of transfer of the priming effects to a different modality. A Production experiment showed that priming res...

A significant problem when translating Japanese dialogues into German is the missing information on number and definiteness in the Japanese analysis output. The integration of the search for such information into the transfer process provides an efficient solution. General transfer rules, preference rules and default rules are combined. The transfer includes conditions to make it possible to co...