: The emergence of the lexicon for events is rather late in L1 acquisition, compared to the lexicon for entities, but the same holds for subsequent L2 acquisition. The semantic processing of verbs by children and adults shows a greater flexibility than the processing of nouns : explanations to that are the relational nature of verbs, and the fact that the lexical categorization of events is les...

It is well known that L2 learners differ from L1 learners in the acquisition of the target language. One of the areas of the grammar in which L2 learners exhibit variability is in the production of verbal morphology, in particular, tense and agreement markings are often found to be optional in L2 data. The contrast in attainment between L1 and L2 has led some researchers to propose that the var...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

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...

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the candies) in 34.3% of the cases, by producing a nucle...

Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first (L1) to L2. While evidence seems suggest that there are significant L1–L2 differences in processing RCs, relatively little is known about source non-target-like behaviour. The present study investigates grammatical acceptability different RC...

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...

Pedagogically, the issue of similarities and/or differences between mother tongue and foreign language is one interesting areas second/foreign acquisition learning. Therefore, this study aims at exploring in which way Turkish (L1) influences English (L2) learning through perspectives EFL undergraduate students, whereby main focus on extent possible effects (L2). A qualitative approach was emplo...

Studies of ultimate attainment in adult second-language (L2) acquisition report a disjunction between success in acquiring the syntax of the target language (TL), on the one hand, and persistent difficulties at the interfaces of syntax with other grammatical modules, e.g. discourse-pragmatics, on the other. However, there continues to be debate as to whether these difficulties arise from devian...

Previous studies investigating the acquisition of L2 stops have found a positive effect experience, but few focused on voiced stops, particularly prevoicing. This study investigates /b/ and /g/ by two populations, English learners Spanish English. Three groups varying in amount experience (mainly length residence, also use instruction) were investigated for each L1 population. Participants comp...