Learning to use prepositions in English as a second language (L2) has been widely acknowledged to pose significant difficulties to learners, especially within metaphorical contexts. Difficulties relate to the complex distributional patterns of prepositions in discourse, namely, the variety of collocations requiring their use, as well as…

Purpose: This study examines the response patterns of 278 Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) on a standardized test of receptive English vocabulary. Method: Investigators analyzed responses to 131 items on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) focusing on differential accuracy on items influenced by…

This paper reports on a study investigating features related to Chinese linguistic complexities among international students enrolled in Chinese courses in China. The main objective of this study is to highlight the major feature of Chinese complexities encountered by international students and explore whether international students' native…

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…

Knowledge of the target specialized language should be of use to English for specific purposes teachers who teach pronunciation. Knowledge of the target learners' first language (L1) should also be useful when these teachers use contrastive analysis, error analysis or interlanguage theory. However, as far as teaching the pronunciation of the…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

A great deal of research concerning the acquisition of English morphology as a second language has been carried out in order to explain some typical stages in the acquisition of the English-s morphemes and the difficulty confronted by second language learners. According to Siegel (2003), interlanguage and functional transfer both play a crucial…

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…