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...

The acquisition of a second language (L2) is clearly somehow different from that of a first language (L1): adult second language learners rarely (if ever) achieve the same native competence that children do learning their first language and, conversely, children never experience the degree of difficulty that L2 learners do. This disparity between L2 and L1 acquisition is perhaps most apparent w...

second language acquisition (sla) always happens when the learners live and have contact with the native speakers of a second language. although this study investigates learning english by ten native children of farsi, the authors try to simulate the second language acquisition environment. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language learning o...

The time course of cross-script translation priming and repetition priming was examined in two different scripts using a combination of the masked priming paradigm with the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). Japanese-English bilinguals performed a semantic categorization task in their second language (L2) English and in their first language (L1) Japanese. Targets were preceded by a v...

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody on their intonation of Japanese sentences. The second language (L2) intonation is a complicated product of the L1 transfer at two levels of prosodic hierarchy: at word level and at phrase levels. L2 speech is hypothesized to retain the characteris...

The relative frequencies of character bigrams appear to contain much information for predicting the first language (L1) of the writer of a text in another language (L2). Tsur and Rappoport (2007) interpret this fact as evidence that word choice is dictated by the phonology of L1. In order to test their hypothesis, we design an algorithm to identify the most discriminative words and the correspo...

Studies of proficient second-language (L2) learners have often noted phonetic drift of their native language (L1) vis-à-vis monolingual norms. Such drift has been attributed to perceptual linkage between similar sounds in L1 and L2. This study provides evidence that L1 phonetic drift is limited neither to advanced L2 learners, nor to crosslanguage influence at a segmental level. During the firs...

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingualism may cause a linguistic disadvantage in lexical access even for bilinguals' first and dominant language. To this purpose, we conducted a picture naming experiment comparing the performance of monolinguals and highly-proficient, L1-dominant bilinguals. The results revealed that monolinguals name pictures faster than bilinguals, both...