This study reports an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of published functional neuroimaging studies of bilingualism. Four parallel meta-analyses were conducted by taking into account the proficiency of participants reported in the studies. The results of the meta-analyses suggest differences in the probabilities of activation…

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively ("at the end of the day"--"eventually"), literally ("at the end of the day"--"in the evening"), and novel phrases ("at the end of the war"). Native speaker results…

Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from…

Appropriacy is the paramount consideration of such an inherently polite speech act as thanking in its use. Traditional study of thanking focuses more on the quantitative investigation of its diverse forms and functions than on interpretation of the process in which it is used appropriately and adequately or not among English native or nonnative…

Using script-based tracking to gain insights into the way students learn or process language information can be traced as far back as to the 1980s. Nevertheless, researchers continue to face challenges in collecting and studying this type of data. The objective of this study is to propose data sharing through data repositories as a way to (a) ease…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the real-time sentence processing of Korean both by native speakers and learners in terms of the availability and the effectiveness of different types of information in the structural prediction. Built on the crosslinguistically contrastive findings between Japanese in Yoshida (2006) and Chinese in…

There is a large body of research indicating that L2 learners often have trouble with the word form. Learners often transfer their L1 processing routines over to the L2 in their attempt to process the L2 forms, whether those routines are appropriate to the L2 form system or not. This study explores the problems of learning L2 vocabulary word form…

Previous evidence has shown that word pairs that are either related in form (e.g., "ruc-berro"; donkey-watercress) or very closely semantically related (e.g., "ruc-caballo", donkey-horse) produce interference effects in a translation recognition task (Ferre et al., 2006; Guasch et al., 2008). However, these effects are not…

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2…

In an event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the use of second language rhythmic properties during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Syntactically ambiguous sentences embedded in rhythmically regular and irregular contexts were presented to Turkish early and late second language (L2) learners of…

A number of studies have suggested the potentials of corpus tools in vocabulary learning. However, there are still some concerns. Corpus tools might be too complicated to use; example sentences retrieved from corpus tools might be too difficult to understand; processing large number of sample sentences could be challenging and time-consuming;…

This report presents work on the development of a new corpus of non-native English writing. It will be useful for the task of native language identification, as well as grammatical error detection and correction, and automatic essay scoring. In this report, the corpus is described in detail.

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading…

This comparative, classroom-based study investigated the effect and effectiveness of introducing a focus on form approach to a content-based, occupation-specific language program for adults. Thirty-six adults in two classes participated in a 10-week study. One group of 16 adults received content-based instruction that included a focus on form…