In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

Since the colonization of the Americans, Filipinos have been using English as their second language and have been accustomed to using the language alongside local languages. The centuries of the extensive contact between American English and Filipino language raises questions pertaining language change and language identity. This paper reports the…

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…