This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system,…

This study focused on the grammatical accuracy of Japanese students who were learning English. The database for the errors came from the Japanese University Student Corpus (JUSC) comprising 61 transcripts containing 51,061 words. An inventory, containing 400 errors in context, was taken from this corpus. The first research question related to the…

This article studies the use of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the written production of learners of Spanish. SVCs are lexical combinations whose content is similar to verbal predicates but is distributed between a verb and a noun, the noun being the carrier of the core lexical meaning of the predicate. Although there is considerable…

The study anchors on the Linguistic research tradition of Error Analysis (EA), focused on the grammatical errors, specifically on "verb tenses" manifested in the sentences of Japanese ESL learners. The entire respondent population was drawn from the pool of registered learners in 2017 at the Clark Institute of the Philippines Foundation,…

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important part in second language learning, especially at intermediate-advanced levels, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. The present study examines ESL learners' use of verb-noun collocations, such as "take notes," "place an…

Discusses some aspects of the Japanese language that look inexplicable at first but that turn out to be explainable by pragmatic principles shared with English. Focus is placed on how the Japanese choose a particular word to use in a sentence involving indirect quotations, when the words would be synonyms in other languages. (20 references) (GLR)

The development of production and comprehension by one two-year-old girl of three Japanese constructions (passives, causatives, and "te moraw"), which have similar surface configurations "NP ga NP ni V ("rare"/ "sase"/ "te moraw") TENSE," is investigated through elicited imitations and responses to the investigator's questions about the content of…

Reports on follow-up analyses of Sasaki's (in press) competition experiment study of Japanese sentence comprehension strategies conducted to investigate the double-object active and transitive causative sentence processing strategies by English-speaking learners of Japanese and how immediate error feedback affects them. The article contrasts…

Examination and comparison of the forms and functions of the passive structures used by native and second-language writers of English and Japanese yielded strong empirical proof of definite interplay and transfer of native language form and function to the target language, resulting in awkward, if not completely incorrect, sentences. (27…

This volume focuses on the psycholinguistic aspects of language transfer when three languages are in contact, and provides an overview of the state of the art in cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition. This edited volume contains, in addition to an introduction, ten chapters. Chapter titles include the following: "The Effect of…