Questions tagged [second-lang-acquisition]
Questions with this tag are about the acquisition of one or more second languages. In other words any language other than the mother tongue or native language of a given speaker.
98 questions
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Does an internationally adopted child have an advantage when acquiring their original native language?
This question is mainly a reference request. I will use the term first native language for the language of the adoptee's birth region and second native language for the language of their adoption ...
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Are there any studies on vocabulary loss and/or simplification of "thought structures" due to multilingualism?
(I am not a linguist, so please forgive any wrong term or concept)
This question comes from personal experience. I have studied in a trilingual university, so that each student knew at least three ...
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Are recasts a hotter research topic than prompts in SLA? If so, why?
It seems that much research concerning corrective feedback in SLA is assuming a recasts-prompts dichotomy, and researchers are willing to further examine recasts in terms of implicitness/explicitness. ...
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Why do nouns typically have their main stress on the penultimate while verbs on the ultimate (according to theories other than that of Hayes)?
I'm working on English stress acquisition by non-native speakers for my Master's Thesis. According to the theories of Hayes (1981) and, subsequently, Halle & Vergnaud (1987), extrametricality (i.e....
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One can learn faster if he listens to his own voice speaking in target language?
I've heard the following statement about foreign language acquisition for a few times:
One can learn a foreign language faster if he can listen to his voice uttering the foreign language.
For example, ...
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Which brain disorders cause better second language learning?
I heard that people with some types of synesthesia may have advantages for learning second languages. I don't know whether it’s true or not. Which kind of brain disorders cause better second-language ...
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Native language rejection
I am looking for statistics/research/terminology about the native language rejection by immigrants. I mean by this partial or complete refusal to use one's mother-tongue in favor of the local language ...
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Controversy & Debate in SLA: Can I ever get concrete takeaways?
I learned Mandarin in high school and later in life (now) started becoming interested in how I was able to acquire it, i.e., the study of SLA.
My goal: As of now, I hope to have concrete strategies ...
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Is Influence of Substratum's phonology biological? [closed]
As a follow up to a recent question (1) where it is argued that the effect of substrate on the second language is most remarkable in phonology:
Do you know if this has biological reasons in production ...
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What is a good multi language translation system for individual parts of speech such as verbs, nouns, adjectives?
I am developing a language learning tool in Python that generates dual-language books intended to be read as audio books.
The system should work by giving single word translations after every ...
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Can the PAM/SLM model be used to explain French speakers' perceptual issues with /h/?
Basically what it says in the title. I'm writing about the perceptual difficulties that French speakers have with /h/, and it seems that the main works for this phenomenon are Paradis & LaCharité ...
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Language acquisition by 100% immersion -- any cases you know of?
I am looking for documented cases where some person or group of people learned a language (= gained ability to communicate) with no prior knowledge of the target language through being immersed in ~...
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Can native ASL signers ID someone’s native sign language from their accent in otherwise fluent ASL?
Google keeps trying to give me native accent variations in ASL when I try to look this up, hence asking it here.
In spoken English, it tends to be relatively obvious if someone’s first language is ...
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Why were early studies on morpheme acquisition criticized?
I was reading the Wikipedia page on Order of acquisition and they said that many studies in the 1970s studied "whether a consistent order of morpheme acquisition", e.g. in L2 learners for ...
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How many *Non-Native* speakers of Egyptian Arabic are there world wide?
Every time I try to look this up, it always gives me the number for native speakers. I'm not looking for that. I specifically want to know how prevalent Egyptian Arabic is as a second language around ...
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Difference in acquisition of active vs. passive language usage skills
By passive and active, I mean understanding language when used vs. using it yourself, like in the terms active/passive vocabulary. My experience learning languages is that active skills are much ...
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Book recommendations for Second Language Acquisition
Can anyone please suggest some good books to read on Second Language Acquisition?
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During second language acquisition, is it common for the speech organs to get tired by speaking the second language?
I am a non-native speaker of English (I'd rather not say what my native language is). I have noticed that my speech organs (tongue, lips, jaws and also the palate but I'm not so sure if it's the ...
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Can formal linguistics help language learning?
I am interested in the intersection between abstract, formal grammars/semantics of human language and the very concrete task of learning a new language. Are there any books whose presentation assumes ...
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Are markedness and the Sonority Sequencing Principle both language universals?
I'm looking into transfer in second language acquisition, specifically on the syllable structure of other L1s transferring onto English. I'm discussing the impact of transfer as well as the impact of ...
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English speakers inserting R in French words
I teach French to people from various background and first languages, but one thing that most English speakers do (even very proficient ones sometimes) is adding R sounds in words. Saying 'droi' for &...
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Is English grammar teaching tradition rooted in Latin?
I heard once that the way English grammar was taught as school was rooted in Latin and it wasn't a correct approach for a number of reason ?
This was a long time ago, so I cannot remember the details.
...
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Is there a concept to describe "a way of saying something that is incorrect, but occurs frequently due to the speaker speaking a second language"?
In the past ten years I've started working with people who's native language is not English. I've noticed that these folks say thing to get a concept across, but it's not something you'd hear a native ...
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Speakers of a foreign language in a nation sounding similar in 'mispronunciations'
For pronunciation of a foreign language, do foreign speakers from a certain country speak with the same accent because they learn in their country from someone with that accent, or their native ...
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Linguistic overview/critique of the Tomatis method
Some advertisements for language training material (like this and this) have a dubious claim that each language has its own frequency range of sounds, or a "pass band", so that listening to ...
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Is it possible to acquire the accent of a foreign language at home?(So i mean by not living in the specific country where the language is spoken) [closed]
I'm a European non-native english speaker with a fairly high level of fluency(my vocabulary is pretty close to the vocab of a native speaker). Since I've been learning English, my goal has always been ...
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Are There Any Papers/Studies/Etc on Teaching L2 Learners how to Parse Speech by Teaching Them Phonotactics?
Are there any studies in which subjects are taught the phonotactics of their L2 in order to help parse words out in their target language's speech? All of the studies I have read concerning the ...
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What is the natural order of language acquisition?
Whenever someone answers this question, the answer becomes as follows: "the natural order of language acquisition is a hypo thesis proposed by Stephen Krashen which says that ..."
But, my question is,...
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How to read and understand linguistics articles?
I was wondering if there is a good way to read and understand Quantitative linguistics articles that has graphs in it?
For example,
For a class, I am currently reading: "Recognition of spoken ...
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Is it possible to speak like a native speaker of English by mastering the phonology?
I know some professors of phonetics teach phonetics(in a country like India) in a laboratory almost similar to that of the native speakers.But when they come out of the class their pronunciation does ...
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Ease of L2 acquisition of SOV and SVO/VSO word order
Is it easier for speakers of SOV languages to learn SOV/VSO syntax or vice versa?
I've been reading about constructed languages recently, specifically the ones intended to be easy to learn such as ...
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Second language learning and immersion among native speakers
In second language learning is there any evidence that fluency cannot be achieved without immersion among native language speakers? If 'yes', what is the reason?
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Is it possible to talk about two different phonemes if they always have the same manifestations?
Both considering L1 speakers and L2 speakers.
It becomes a bit tricky involving L2 speakers. While a phoneme is defined as one of the units of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a ...
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Is ending a sentence with a possessive considered informal? [closed]
Does corpora show any genre preferences for ending sentences with a nominal possessive? Does it occur more in spoken and informal written texts than in academic texts?
I really appreciate your input.
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Is there any "standard" definition of "linguistic input"?
Recently, I've started wondering how to characterize "linguistic input" and realized that the notion is very rarely unpacked. It seems as if everyone takes it to be obvious, and immediately goes to ...
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Second and third language "search"
In my third or fourth language, when I don't know a word or phrase, I substitute a word from my other non-native language rather than the one I obviously know in my native language. Or if I'm looking ...
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Do people "babble" while learning an L2?
I'm currently learning Japanese (みんなさん、こんにちは！), and I've began noticing myself doing the oddest thing while listening to Japanese.
I sometimes find myself uttering back sounds I hear; even when I don'...
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How to know whether a word is context appropriate? [closed]
So as we all know in both Englisch und Deutsch there are many nouns/verbs that either mean the same or close to the same as eachother, but are chosen based on the context (ex: damp, moist, soggy, etc.....
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Educating people in their mother tongue
Not all nations provide education in the national tongue.
In India, being educated in English is generally preferred.
I am looking for any study with details about the situations in different ...
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I don't know what my L1 is and want to find out
I've been doing personal research in Second Language Acquisition by reading a book on the subject (Understanding Second Language Acquisition -- by Lourdes Ortega) and I've become convinced that the L1 ...
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required standards for US domestic foreign language education
In reference to my earlier post, I'm going to be teaching foreign languages in some capacity and was advised by a board of education that I ought to understand and incorporate foreign language edu. ...
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The benefits of studying a second language with word-by-word translations in one's mother tongue [closed]
I've recently been taking French and am having a bit of a hard time understanding the word order of certain sentences or phrases when I'm forming them in my mind. I tend to do the word-by-word ...
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L2 acquisition as a factor in loss of "complex" grammatical features
Recently I came across a short text on Language Log briefly discussing a phenomenon which seems to affect certain languages. The author noticed that loss or heavy weakening of inflection during ...
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Analysing the notion of the native speaker
I am interested in the notions of the native, native-like, near native... speakers in linguistics. I have encountered several non-equivalent definitions/characterizations of these concepts. Right now, ...
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Research on SLA for "Reading Only"
Is there research in SLA by graduate students and others who "acquire" a rudimentary understanding of a language primarily for the purpose of reading original academic research and sources in that ...
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How "fluent" do professional classicists get in reading Latin and Greek? How do they do it?
I've learned to an intermediate reading level Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Classical Arabic. As a foreign language teacher, I'm well aware of current SLA research and the focus on communication and ...
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Sign languages of non-mute people
Does anyone study the sign language of people that can actually speak/pronounce/utter words? What would you call such study and what would you call such subject?
I mean, if a person can use both ...
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comparative study of spoken language complexity or irregularity
Could you recommend a publicly accessible study/article that quantitatively compares languages by their complexity or irregularity?
I am interested in spoken languages only. Not writing/spelling.
...
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Sources on average retention rate of language based on time [closed]
I am creating a language learning app and am interested in sources/publications which offer statistics on retention rate of languages over time.
For example, I have data that my product taught ...
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Where is American English not chosen as the dialect of English taught as a second language? [closed]
Apart from countries where English is taught as a second language only to immigrants and indigenous peoples (e.g. Australia), where is American English not chosen as the dialect taught when teaching ...
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