In the current study, we examined the role of first-language (L1) influence on the additional-language development of grammatical gender marking in Spanish. The participants were L1 speakers of English or French (N = 215), who were learning Spanish and who were at three instructional levels. The data came from their use of gender marking in…

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

This study investigated the psycholinguistic and child-related variables that modulate vocabulary development and the so-called receptive-expressive gap in child L2 learners of Gaelic with English as their L1. In total, 50 6- to 8-year-old English-Gaelic bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium immersion education were administered the English…

Previous research has shown that language learners tend to produce fewer and less-natural multi-word sequences (MWSs) compared to native speakers of the same language. In the present study, collocational processing was investigated in a sentence reading task. Specifically, the familiar collocations were predicted to modulate the P3 mean amplitudes…

In this study, we investigated the accuracy of first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' intuitive judgments of phrasal frequency and collocation strength, and examined the linguistic influences that give rise to these judgments. L1 and L2 speakers of English judged 180 adjective-noun collocations as (a) high frequency, medium…

To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency, and association on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to L1 and L2 speakers of English. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling for 3 types of adjective-noun pairs: (a) high-frequency, (b)…

The aim of the present study was to examine the interplay of morphological configuration switching and language switching. The morphological configuration is present in word-formation whenever a word contains more than one free morpheme. The morphological configuration is variable both within and between languages for example in two-digit number…

Prosody signals important aspects of meaning, and hence, is crucial for language comprehension and learning, yet remains under-investigated in second-language (L2) processing. The present electrophysiology study investigates the use of prosody to cue information structure, in particular, the use of contrastive pitch accent (L+H*) to define the set…

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly…

This study examines first language (L1) English transfer in the acquisition of plural noun semantics in second language (L2) Arabic. Drawing on previous research on the L2 acquisition of plural noun interpretation, the study presents and discusses new production data of specific and generic definite plurals by English-speaking learners of Arabic…