I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the…

There is mounting evidence that the ease of producing and understanding language depends not only on the frequencies of individual words but also on the frequencies of word combinations. However, in two picture description experiments, Janssen and Barber (2012) found that French and Spanish speakers' speech onset latencies for short phrases…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

This article reports an eye-tracking study on the native and non-native processing of case in Spanish. Twenty-four native and 27 first language (L1) German non-native speakers of Spanish were tested on their sensitivity to case marking violations involving structural case with objects of ditransitive verbs and to violations of inherent case for…

Feedback, or information given to learners regarding their performance, is found to facilitate second language (L2) learning. Research also suggests that the timing of feedback (whether it is provided immediately or after a delay) may affect learning. The purpose of the present study was to identify the optimal feedback timing for L2 vocabulary…

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

The growing recognition of the plurality of English underlying the World Englishes (WE) paradigm has problematised the conventional second language acquisition (SLA) views of errors. If English use in emerging English-speaking contexts is to be judged by local norms, as argued by WE scholars, applying exocentric norms in these contexts can be…

Numerous studies, examining the acquisition of non-referential it in [-pro-drop] English by learners of [+pro-drop] languages, have revealed that their participants omit non-referential subjects in English if their L1 allows null-subject position. However, due to the specificity of their focus, these studies have not considered other difficulties…

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 research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

Language interference is one of the factors that affect language learning by many learners of second and third languages. In Zambia, the impact of language interference on the learners of French requires closer attention. Our literature review shows that few studies have looked at the impact of interference from Zambian languages on the learners…

Every article sent by an author to a reputed scientific journal undergoes a rigorous editorial evaluation. The editor has the final responsibility of accepting or rejecting manuscripts and thus can confer authority and validity on the author's research and help to disseminate new knowledge. In this task, editors make use of a panel of expert peer…

This study investigated the performance of native and non native speakers of Modern Greek language on morphology and syntax tasks. Non-native speakers of Greek whose native language was English, which is a language with strict word order and simple morphology, made more errors and answered more slowly than native speakers on morphology but not…

The authors studied the acquisition of nine #sC clusters in 30 Croatian-speaking phonologically disordered children, aged between 3;8-7;0 years, by analysing their renditions of target words elicited in response to visual stimuli presented on a computer screen. Results did not support the idea that a greater jump in sonority from C1 to C2 would…