This paper presents a descriptive investigation on verbal and written use of past-time inflectional marker -"ed" by Indonesian English majors. Given that English has a foreign language status in Indonesia, acquiring grammatical forms and specific to this study, the -"ed" inflection, is challenging to learners. Difficulties in…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

Research on individual differences in second language (L2) reading ability has primarily focused on factors known to contribute to first language (L1) reading ability, with little consideration of factors mediating interference between languages. In an exploratory analysis, we compared the degree to which the linguistic interference that readers…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…

In this article we focus on "false cognates", lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them.…

This paper examines the different types of writing errors performed by 16 international postgraduate students undertaking an intensive English course at a public university in Malaysia. It was mandatory for international postgraduate students who obtained less than IELTS Band 6 to undertake an Intensive English Course (IEC) offered by the…

Academic writing requires both style and grammatical correctness; however, efforts in improving the quality of English academic writing by non-native students have been focused on grammar. Structures observed in this study were grammatically correct, but considered unnatural in academic writing genre. This research involves a group of non-native…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

The study uses an elicited imitation (EI) task to examine the effect of the native language on the use of the English nongeneric definite article by highly proficient first-language (L1) Spanish and Russian speakers and to test the hierarchy of article difficulty first proposed by Liu and Gleason (2002). Our findings suggest that there is a clear…

English grammar and lexis seem to be among the most problematic areas in second language (L2) acquisition. A good number of past studies have investigated English learners' different kinds of errors, using a variety of elicitation techniques, such as a translation task, a grammaticality judgment task, a role play, an essay, etc. The current study…

The negative attitude towards translation as another pedagogical means in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) has prevailed for much time (Cook, 2010). Nonetheless, currently, many theorists and linguistics agree on the importance of using translation activities in foreign language teaching and underline its beneficial effects to expand vocabulary, to…

Muysken argues for four general "strategies" that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use…

We present an original model designed to study how a second language (L2) is acquired in bilinguals at different proficiencies starting from an existing L1. The model assumes that the conceptual and lexical aspects of languages are stored separately: conceptual aspects in distinct topologically organized Feature Areas, and lexical aspects in a…

Executive control abilities and lexical access speed in Stroop performance were investigated in English monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals (English-Chinese and Chinese-English) in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Predictions were based on a bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis, implicating cognitive control ability as the…

Writing is the most difficult skill in English, so most EFL students tend to make errors in writing. In assisting the learners to successfully acquire writing skill, the analysis of errors and the understanding of their sources are necessary. This study attempts to explore the major sources of errors occurred in the writing of EFL students. It…