In this study, we show that second-language (L2) spoken-word recognition is greatly influenced by syllable-structure differences between the native language (L1) and the second language (L2), and that L2 word-recognition accuracy is a reliable predictor of L2 word-production accuracy. Spanish-speaking English learners (experimental group) completed a listening task in which they monitored /(ǝ)s...

In the last 25 years, cognitive scientists have come to see that usingmore than one language is a natural circumstance of human experience, not an exceptional condition that produces disordered speaking or thinking (1). The revision of previously held negative views about bilingualism is largely attributable to the finding that although bilinguals appear to activate both languages when reading,...

The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

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...

s n log p, where s is the dimension of the sparsest model. These are, respectively, the conditions of this paper using the Dantzig selector and those of Bunea, Tsybakov and Wegkamp [2] and Meinshausen and Yu [9] using the Lasso. Strictly speaking, Bunea, Tsybakov and Wegkamp consider only prediction, not l2 loss, but in a paper in preparation with Ritov and Tsybakov we show that the spirit of t...

PURPOSE Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of late age of acquisition of the L2 on syntactic i...

How the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean) influence the comprehension of sentences in a second language (English) was investigated in a series of self-paced reading time studies. Native Mandarinand Korean-speaking learners of English were compared with native English speakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity about the relationship between a verb and the noun following ...

Abstract The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes utterance (UF) at level of constructs. A total 128 Japanese-speaking learners English completed four speaking tasks—argumentative task, picture narrative reading-to-speaking and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task—and a battery linguistic knowledge tests, capturing vocabulary size, lexical retrieval ...

The application of zone of proximal development (ZPD), as a major tenet of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT, 1978), has recently been invited in the L2 learning/teaching profession. This study mainly examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ interactions in diverse ZPD-activated proximal contexts through the use of storytelling instruction could improve their oral (speaking) proficiency and at...