This study examined the linguistic competence in Korean of Korean heritage language learners (HLLs), compared to English-speaking non-heritage language learners (NHLLs) of Korean. It is unclear and controversial as to whether heritage languages learners are exposed to early but are interrupted manifest as L1 competence or share more…

This paper reports the findings of a study aiming to reveal the recurring patterns of lexical, syntactic and textual errors in student translations of a specialized EU genre from English into Hungarian. By comparing the student translations to the official translation of the text, this article uncovers the most frequent errors that students made…

Chinese Students' English has its own characteristics. It is of significance to analyze and study these characteristics. The paper uses the corpus approach to study the misuse of tenses in Chinese College students' CET-4 compositions of the sub-corpus of "Non-major College Students" in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Nine…

This article reports the results of an experiment on production of "his/her" in English as a second language (L2) by proficient native speakers of Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. In Dutch and English, 3rd person singular possessive pronouns agree in gender with their antecedents, in Italian and Spanish possessives in general agree with the noun they…

In response to new theoretical claims and inconclusive empirical findings regarding relative clauses in East Asian languages, this study examined the factors relevant to relative clause production by Korean heritage speakers. Gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (plus or minus animate), and the topicality of head nouns (plus or minus…

Malay is a consistent alphabetic orthography with complex syllable structures. The focus of this research was to investigate word recognition performance in order to inform reading interventions for low-progress early readers. Forty-six Grade 1 students were sampled and 11 were identified as low-progress readers. The results indicated that both…

Non-word repetition (NWR) was investigated in adolescents with typical development, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Plus language Impairment (ALI) (n = 17, 13, 16, and mean age 14;4, 15;4, 14;8 respectively). The study evaluated the hypothesis that poor NWR performance in both groups indicates an overlapping language phenotype…

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic. The nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production. The central empirical questions revolve around properties of "exchange errors". These…

The influence of orthographic knowledge has been consistently observed in speech recognition and metaphonological tasks. The present study provides data suggesting that such influence also pervades other cognitive domains related to language abilities, such as verbal working memory. Using serial recall of auditory seven-word lists, we observed…

Learning new vocabulary words in a second language is a challenge for the adult learner, especially when the second language writing system differs from the first language writing system. According to the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2001), there are three constituents to word-level knowledge: orthographic, phonological, and…

Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender…

This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participants in the telematic simulation IDEELS (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation). The synchronous and asynchronous communication analysed was part of the MiLC Corpus, a multilingual learner corpus of texts written by…

Some have argued in favor of translation in the L2 classroom (Danchev, 1983; Levenston, 1985; Ballester Casado, 1991; Newson, 1998; Malloy, 2001; Bonyadi, 2003; Colina, 2006; Kulwindr, 2005; Petrocchi, 2006; House, 2008), while others have argued against it (Sweet, 1899/1964; Jespersen, 1901/1904; Lado, 1957, 1964; Gatenby, 1967; Sankey, 1991),…

This article examines the relationship between writing and attention problems and hypothesizes that homophone spelling errors coincide with attention deficits. We analyze specific types of attention deficits, which may contribute to Attention Deficits Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); rather than studying ADHD, however, we focus on the inattention…

Concern exists among both academics and employers regarding the quality of graduates' writing. The complaint, as it is most commonly phrased, is that young graduates can no longer "string a simple sentence together". If true, this is a problem: the quality of students' writing seriously affects their chances in the job market. In this…