Publications
The Second Language Acquisition Lab is dedicated to advancing the field of linguistics through research on second language acquisition and language processing.
Our lab has produced a variety of scholarly articles, book chapters, manuscripts, presentations, posters, theses, and dissertations.
Read more about our projects!
Our latest publications
Martohardjono, G., Johns, M., Franciotti, P., Castillo, D., Porru, I., & Lowry, C. (2023). Use of the first-acquired language modulates pupil size in the processing of island constraint violations. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1180989.
This study uses pupillometry, a method that has only recently been used in psycholinguistic studies of bilingualism, to investigate pupillary responses to three syntactic island constructions in two groups of Spanish/English bilinguals: heritage speakers and late bilinguals.
Franciotti, P. & Martohardjono, G. (2022). Intervention Effects in L1 and L2 English Raising: Evidence from Acceptability Judgments and Response Times. In Shimanskaya, E., Leal, T. & Isabelli, C. Generative SLA in the age of Minimalism: Features, interfaces, and beyond, John Benjamins.
We investigate L1 Italian-L2 English speakers using three types of subject raising constructions: Raising over lexical DPs, pronominal DPs, and topicalizations. We test locality constraints in L2 English, including how intervention effects affect the L2 processing of A-dependencies and whether exceptionality to certain locality constraints are learnable.
Stover, L., Stern, M. C., Lowry, C., & Martohardjono, G. (2021). Effects of Language Dominance on L1 Relative Clause Processing. In V. Torrens (Ed), Syntax Processing, 200-227. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The present study investigated the effects of language dominance during bilingual comprehension of relative clauses. We asked whether language dominance, operationalized as a continuous variable, modulates whether/how Spanish-English bilinguals exhibit a relative clause subject-object processing asymmetry in their first-learned language, Spanish. Highly proficient bilinguals with varying ages of arrival to the US completed a language dominance questionnaire and a visual world eye-tracking experiment with auditorily presented Spanish relative clauses.
Porru, I., Stern, M. C., & Martohardjono, G. (2021). Comparing dominance measures in speakers of typologically different languages: A case study of Turkish-English Bilinguals. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL-4).
This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of dominance in typologically different languages, such as Turkish and English. Developing robust measures of dominance is especially important and challenging for this population, since most methods to measure dominance rely on syntax or grammatical structures.
Martohardjono, G., Lowry, C., Johns, M. A., Phillips, I., & Madsen II, C. N. (2021). Bilingual judgements and processing of Spanish wh-gap constructions: an exploratory study of cross-linguistic influence and island strength. In V. Torrens (Ed), Syntax Processing, 127-121. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
This study investigated whether two groups of fluent bilinguals—who vary in their lifetime exposure to their first-learned language, Spanish—display variable sensitivity to grammatical and ungrammatical wh-gap constructions in their first language.
Stern, M. C., Madsen II, C. N., Stover, L. M., Lowry, C., & Martohardjono, G. (2019). Language history attenuates syntactic prediction in L1 processing. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(2), 235–255.
An eye-tracking experiment in the Visual World Paradigm was conducted to examine the effects of language history on the predictive parsing of sentences containing relative clauses in the first-learned language of fluent bilingual adults. We compared heritage speakers of Spanish (HSs)—who had spent most of their lives immersed in an English-dominant society—to Spanish–English late bilinguals (LBs), who did not begin immersion in an English-dominant society until adulthood.
Ma, L., Martohardjono, G., & McClure, W. (2019). The functional roles of lexical devices in second language learners’ encoding of temporality: A study of Mandarin Chinese-speaking ESL learners. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching.
The present study investigates the functional roles of two lexical devices, past-time temporal adverbials and frequency adverbs, in Mandarin Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ encoding of temporality in their English interlanguage.