This study investigates the developmental rate of "estar" production by Chinese-speaking learners in planned written production. The forms of Spanish copula verbs have no equivalent forms in Chinese in pre-adjectival position (i.e. no copula verb exists between a referent and an adjective in Chinese). This contrast between languages provides a…

The theme for this year's College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was "Engaged Language Research and Practice," with the plenary speech given by Dr. Kathryn A. Davis. Following a preface from the editors and plenary speaker highlights, contents of these proceedings include: Section I:…

This study investigates learners' knowledge of word classes (i.e. noun, verb, adjective) in their second language (L2). Although some L2 studies have examined the problem of word class indirectly through a focus on vocabulary and the teaching of derivational morphology (Morin, 2003, 2006; Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002), little is known about learners'…

The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate pragmatic transfer in refusals by native speakers of Mandarin speaking English, and to what extent transfer is influenced by the learners' level of L2 proficiency. The elicitation instrument used for data collection was the discourse completion questionnaire developed by Beebe et al. [Beebe, L.,…

Studies on bilingualism from a neurocognitive perspective have begun to attract considerable interest recently. Contextual variables--such as age of acquisition, level of proficiency and frequency of use--have been identified as significantly impacting on the convergence or divergence of representations in first language (L1) and second (L2)…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

Purpose: This study assesses the factors that contribute to Spanish and English language development in bilingual children. Method: Seven hundred and fifty-seven Hispanic prekindergarten and kindergarten-age children completed screening tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English. Parents provided information about…

This study examined effects of synonym generation on second language (L2) vocabulary learning during reading in both incidental and intentional vocabulary learning contexts. Spanish-speaking adult learners of L2 English (N = 114) at low- and high-intermediate proficiency levels read an English passage containing 10 target words translated in the…

The factors influencing the degree of separation or overlap in the neuronal networks responsible for the processing of first and second language are still subject to investigation. This longitudinal study investigates how increasing second language proficiency influences activation differences during lexico-semantic processing of first and second…

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch-English, French-English). The…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…