Based on the Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1978; MacWhinney, 2005; MacWhinney, 2012), the present study investigates L2 cue strategies in the acquisition of Chinese notional passives by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking learners. Two experiments were conducted to examine both the comprehension and production of Chinese notional passives. The main findings included: 1) L2 learners’...

In the field of second language (L2) production, phonetic investigations of L2 fricatives are rare due to the complexity of establishing similarities and differences between L1 and L2 fricatives. The study of English /s/ production by L2 Thai learners has not received much attention, as researchers on L2 English have typically believed that learners would produce this sound with ease due to the...

There is little agreement on the mechanisms involved in second language (L2) processing of regular and irregular inflectional morphology and on the exact role of age, amount, and type of exposure to L2 resulting in differences in L2 input and use. The article contributes to the ongoing debates by reporting the results of two experiments on Russian verb generation and recognition in a lexical de...

A considerable number of studies have hitherto examined how native speakers and second language (hereafter L1 and L2, respectively) learners of English process English prepositional phrases. It is usually thought that both L1 and L2 speakers have a preference for verb phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke the old window with a ball of snow.) over noun phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke...

Existing research indicates that instructed learners’ L2 proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge are moderately correlated. However, the operationalization of the construct of metalinguistic knowledge has varied somewhat across studies. Metalinguistic knowledge has typically been operationalized as learners’ ability to correct, describe, and explain L2 errors. More recently, this operati...

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...

Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to "objective" syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process p...

Existing research indicates that instructed learners' L2 proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge are moderately correlated. However, the operationalization of the construct of metalinguistic knowledge has varied somewhat across studies. Metalinguistic knowledge has typically been operationalized as learners' ability to correct, describe, and explain L2 errors. More recently, this operati...

There has been much recent work investigating second language (L2) acquisition of English articles by speakers of article-less L1s (Huebner 1983, Master 1987, Parrish 1987, Thomas 1989, Kaneko 1996, Leung 2001, Ionin, Ko and Wexler 2004, Hawkins et al. 2006, Ko, Ionin and Wexler 2006, Ionin, Zubizarreta and Bautista Maldonado 2008, Trenkic 2008, among others). Examining L2-learners production o...

This study compared the use of lexical knowledge and stress cues in segmentation by Mandarin second language (L2) of English. Previous research has shown that native English speakers reliably use lexical cues but not stress cues. However, L2 learners may have difficulty using lexical knowledge in segmentation due to their limited vocabulary size. Instead, Mandarin L2 learners may rely on stress...