With the intent of adding to literature leading toward a more complete theory second language vocabulary acquisition, this study elicited accuracy data from 110 ESL learners ranging novice high advanced low on 64 words randomly selected in 2K–3K range Corpus Contemporary American English (COCA) (32 verbs, 24 nouns, 8 adjectives) covering eight aspects word knowledge. These included spelling bas...

Abstract. Recent research has shown that learners demonstrate huge variability in second language (L2) end-state attainment. While some L2 attain native-like command, others only an undeveloped command and stuck between. It is also assumed early often surpass owing to Lenneberg’s Critical Period Hypothesis (1967) proposes onset advance development. This study investigates the extent which, age ...

There are a lot of learners all around the world, who are studying in the field of English, but not all of them are proficient in any field of English such as (literature-teaching-translation), and especially in the field of translation which requires a considerable knowledge of two languages such as English and Persian. The present article intended to consider the contrastive of English and Pe...

Abstract Bringing together lines of research from sentence processing and lexical access, this empirical study investigates the interplay between (grammatical gender) syntactic (word order) cross-linguistic overlap in L2 German. Eighty-six L1 Spanish-L2 German thirty-six monolingual adults completed a self-paced reading task with noun phrases (NPs) manipulated by L1-L2 gender congruency (congru...

In this paper we present a method to group adjectives according to their meaning, as a first step towards the automatic identification of adjectival scales. We discuss the properties of adjectival scales and of groups of semantically related adjectives and how they imply sources of linguistic knowledge in text corpora. We describe how our system exploits this linguistic knowledge to compute a m...

Our study uses event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate two factors in the second language (L2) processing of agreement: the role of number and gender features in the native language (L1), and the impact of individual differences between learners. Previous ERP studies investigating L2 agreement vary as to whether they find native-like processing (e.g., Rossi et al., 2006; Tokowicz and MacW...

This thesis explored the possibility of deriving constraints on the acquisition of adjective meanings from knowledge of the semantics of adjectives. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the problem of learning the meanings of words and possible classes of solutions. It is proposed that an important source of constraint on the meanings of novel words can be derived from studying adult's knowledge of langua...

We address the problem of generating adjectives in a text generation system. We distinguish between usages of adjectives informing the hearer of a property of an object and usages expressing an intention of the speaker, or an argumentative orientation. For such argumentative usages, we claim that a generator cannot simply map from information in the knowledge base to adjectives. Instead, we ide...