Journal of Second Language Studies - Online First

This review attempts to chart a research program that focuses on tonal bilingualism. More than 70% of the world languages use pitch contours to disambiguate word meanings, however, limited empirical and theoretical effort was made to understand the processing mechanisms of lexical tones in the bilingual context. This article will start with the main characteristics of tonal languages, with a focus on Mandarin Chinese, followed by empirical findings on lexical tones in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Finally, this article will propose a few important theoretical issues relevant to tonal bilingualism and implications of learning a tonal language as a second/foreign language.

Native English speakers do not show masked priming effects in lexical decision when a prime word is related to its target purely on the basis of orthographic form (e.g., pillow-PILL, protest-PROTECT). There is strong evidence, however, that non-native English speakers do show such form priming. This paper explores the possible cognitive mechanisms behind this difference between native and non-native speakers. Taft and Li (2020) found that only non-native speakers (with Chinese as their first language) showed priming when the nonword prime ended in the same embedded word as the word target (e.g., plerough-THOROUGH), but a newly reported experiment goes on to show priming for native speakers as well when the shared letter-combination is not itself a word (e.g., celtoise-TORTOISE). This contrast in results leads to the interpretation that native speakers have a specific mechanism for activating embedded words that is important when recognizing polymorphemic words through their stems. It is suggested that non-native speakers, or at least those with Chinese as their first language, do not engage or are slow in engaging such a mechanism. The form priming that they demonstrate arises from facilitated processing of the repeated letters rather than the pre-activation of a lexical representation.

This study investigated the role of prompt types in the emotion and lexical complexity level in L2 writing performance using fine-grained automatic textual analyzing tools and indices. Fifty-three ESL advanced-mid students wrote essays on pandemic (esp. COVID-19) and non-pandemic prompts. A textual Sentiment Analysis was carried out to detect both positive and negative emotions expressed in the students’ writing. A set of six lexical complexity indices was calculated to examine further the rarity, fluency, sophistication, and diversity levels in writing. The results revealed that the prompt types affect the emotional and lexical complexity of L2 writing. These results also showed that emotionality and lexical complexity have intricate and significant interactions, providing evidence for an emotion-lexicon link in L2 writing. Our results indicated that emotion has a substantial role in L2 writing beyond the traditional cognition-centered perspective, echoing the call of an ‘affective turn’ in second language acquisition (SLA) research.

This study presents the results of an experimental investigation into the L2 acquisition of the core-peripheral distinction in the syntax of split intransitivity by L1 Mandarin EFL learners to verify whether or not their L2 acquisition is lexically constrained by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy, which predicts that core verbs have primacy in both L1 and L2 acquisition over peripheral ones ( Sorace, 2000 , 2004 , 2011 ). Two diagnostics of English split intransitivity, the prenominal past participles (PPPs) and the for hours constructions, were used to test native English speakers and Mandarin EFL learners’ gradient acceptability with respect to core-peripheral verb classes. The results of an acceptability judgment test show that both native speakers and nonnative speakers are sensitive to the core-peripheral distinction in the two diagnostics, and EFL learners exhibit a native-like sensitivity to core unaccusatives in PPPs but not in the for hours constructions. The results confirm that the core-peripheral distinction can be accounted for neither by L1 transfer nor L2 input, which suggests for the behavior is due to direct access to semantic universals in the L2 acquisition of split intransitivity syntax.