This study investigated how standard and substandard varieties of first language (L1) Dutch affect grammatical gender assignments to nouns in second language (L2) German. While German distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, the masculine--feminine distinction has nearly disappeared in Standard Dutch. Many substandard Belgian…

Recognition and interference of a nontarget language (Russian) during production in a target language (English) were tested in Russian-English bilinguals using eye movements and picture naming. In Experiment 1, Russian words drew more eye movements and delayed English naming to a greater extent than control nonwords and English translation…

The present study investigates the developmental aspect of the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient…

Contrastive analysis a priori predicts facts of possible errors in learning a second language that contrastive analysis a posteriori cannot explain. In a study of relative clause formation, the latter approach shows that students have no trouble, whereas the former approach shows the task to be so difficult that they avoid it. (AG)

Results of a diagnostic test revealed that Thai students have no more trouble in learning English prepositions than others learning English as a second language; all the groups had difficulty. Error analysis was found to be just as effective in explaining mistakes as contrastive analysis. (AG)