Event segmentation tests have shown substantial overlaps in how adults recognize starts and endpoints as events unfold. However, far less is known about what role different language systems play in the process. Variations in grammatical aspect have been shown to influence event processing. We tested how closely first language (L1) speakers of…

Theories of reading comprehension have widely predicted a role for syntactic skills, or the ability to understand and manipulate the structure of a sentence. Yet, these theories are based primarily on English, leaving open the question of whether this remains true across typologically different languages such as English versus Chinese. There are…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language,…

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

Listeners selectively tune in to the most relevant cues for contrasting sounds, and this process impacts their perceptual sensitivity to these cues (Nosofsky, 1986; Pisoni, 1991). For bilingual listeners, recent work suggests a shared L1/L2 phonology system with the phonetic properties of each sound established in a language-specific way…

Vocabulary assessment is an important part of measuring language proficiency in both monolingual and bilingual children. The LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) provides a framework for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual children using a standardized procedure and comparable stimuli across languages. All language…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

This paper examines the construct of bilingual phonemic awareness in Irish-English bilinguals. Though traditionally viewed as a skill or ability which transfers across languages, recent accounts have considered whether phonemic awareness has a language-specific component. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine this question. A total…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

While the benefits of form-focused instruction (FFI) for grammar and general vocabulary are well-documented, research on its impact on L2 academic vocabulary acquisition remains limited. This study examines the effects of focus-on-form (FonF) and focus-on-forms (FonFs) activities on learning both general and academic vocabulary in Korean EFL…

Despite the widely recognized importance of metacognition in language learning, relatively few empirical studies have investigated the role of metacognitive strategies with a cross-linguistic perspective. Drawing on the mixed-method design combining questionnaire and interview data, this study systematically investigated the effects, the transfer…