This study investigates sources of phonological cross-linguistic influence (CLI) at the initial stages of third language (L3) acquisition in light of the predictions of the second language (L2) Status Factor Model, the Typological Primacy Model, the Cumulative Enhancement Model, the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model. The productions…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of Russian initial stop contrasts by Chinese learners, addressing two specific research questions: (1) How similar are Russian voiced stops to Mandarin stops for Chinese learners?; and (2) How can the speech learning model (SLM) be applied to account for the…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

Language switch costs have been explored less in receptive tasks than in productive tasks, and previous studies have produced mixed findings with regard to switch cost symmetry and the relationship of switch costs to executive function. To address these unresolved gaps, one hundred Chinese-English bilingual adults completed a bilingual lexical…

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the "second…

Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral…