The study uses an elicited imitation (EI) task to examine the effect of the native language on the use of the English nongeneric definite article by highly proficient first-language (L1) Spanish and Russian speakers and to test the hierarchy of article difficulty first proposed by Liu and Gleason (2002). Our findings suggest that there is a clear…

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier "every" and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

A perception experiment involving a novel language pairing, that of Japanese as a first language (L1) and Russian as a second language (L2), was conducted with 33 Japanese learners of Russian to determine whether two phonological models could successfully predict patterns of perceptual difficulty with eight Russian segments. The Featural Model of…

This study of first language Russian children acquiring English as a Second Language investigates the reasons behind omission of verbal inflection in second language (L2) acquisition and argues for presence of functional categories in second language grammar. Shows that child L2 learners, while omitting inflection, almost never produce incorrect…