Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon…

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross-situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co-occurrences to learn word-to-object mappings and concurrently form object categories…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

This study aimed to examine how second language (L2) readers process and comprehend paired sentences based on the causal and semantic relatedness of the sentences. Causal relatedness refers to the cause-and-effect relations between the events described, whereas semantic relatedness refers to the similarity of meaning conveyed by the sentences. In…

This study investigates L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection…

This study examines whether lexical features and textual properties along with individual differences on the part of readers influence word processing times during second language (L2) reading comprehension. Forty-eight Spanish-speaking adolescent and adult learners of English read nine English passages in a self-paced word-by-word reading…

Background: This study aims to develop a test for assessing pragmatic comprehension ability in Chinese as a second language (L2). Following the framework of an argument-based approach to test validation, this study attempts to obtain backing for the Evaluation and Explanation inferences. Methods: Test items were developed based on two sources of…

This study investigated whether Chinese--Korean bilinguals can use structure-based information to interpret Korean sentences containing floating numeral quantifiers during online processing. A numeral quantifier in Korean can be stranded from its modified noun through scrambling as long as the quantifier forms a constituent with the noun. For…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

This study seeks to understand how bilinguals process texts with lexical cues in their first language (L1) and second language (L2) using an eye-tracking methodology. Quantitative data were obtained from an eye-tracker and a post-test, while qualitative data were gathered through interviews with the participants. The findings from the eye-tracking…

The purpose of the present research is investigating cultural competence development processes of students studying at Selcuk University Department of English Translation and Interpretation. Data of the research were collected with English Translation and Interpretation Students' Cultural Competence Development Processes Survey, developed by the…

This study explored the attitudes of ethnic Latvian listeners towards Latvian-Russian bilinguals. Fifty-seven ethnic Latvians completed an identity questionnaire to obtain estimates of their ethnic beliefs and rated the speech of eight Latvian-Russian bilinguals for personal traits, judged how well social and ethnic labels apply to bilinguals, and…

Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…

In order to investigate the internal factors present in the interlanguage of learners of English as a foreign language, a qualitative research study was implemented to analyze the written productions of college students. The main objective of this case study was to identify the type of errors the students made and suggest the cognitive reasons…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…