The mechanisms underlying native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing have been widely debated. One account of potential L1/L2 differences is that L2 sentence processing underuses syntactic information and relies heavily on semantic and surface cues. Recently, an alternative account has been proposed, which argues that the source of L1/L2…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

This research aims to address the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating. The significance of the study is to detect syntactic issues among Saudi Arabian undergraduate students. The question is addressed in the study: what are the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating? The researcher used a…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners' difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the…

The reversal error is a prevalent phenomenon that consists of reversing the relationship between two variables when writing equations from comparison in verbal language. A study with 169 Basque/Spanish bilingual pre-service teachers examined whether this error is mainly due to the students' tendency to employ a direct-translation strategy based on…

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian-English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by…

There is an ongoing debate in the field of Second Language Acquisition concerning whether a fundamental difference exists between the native language (L1) and adult second language (L2) online processing of syntax and morpho-syntax. The Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen and Felser, 2006a, b) states that L2 online parsing is qualitatively…

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first…

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not…

This study has investigated the interlanguage features in spoken language of four foreigner learners of Bangla. Data has been collected through interviews which were recorded and analyzed. The analysis of the respondents' language has been made in terms of phonetic, morphological and syntactic aspects. The language deviations may be attributed to…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

In the experiments outlined in this article, the authors investigate lexical access processes in language production. In their earlier work, T. Pechmann and D. Zerbst (2002) reported evidence for grammatical category constraints in a picture-word interference task. Although grammatical category information was not activated when subjects produced…

Discusses the influence a first language can have on the acquisition of a second language. Includes some tentative proposals on the interaction of prior first-language knowledge and the creative construction process. (EKN)