The representation of grammatical gender in the bilingual mental lexicon: the case of cognate and noncognate nouns

The present paper investigates the shared or independent nature of grammatical gender representations in the bilingual mental lexicon[1] and the role word form similarity (as in the case of cognates) plays in these representations. In a translation task from Greek (L1) to German (L2), L1-L2 nouns with the same gender (gender-congruent) were translated faster than L1-L2 nouns with a different gender (gender-incongruent) when the L2 target utterance required computation of gender agreement (adjective + noun). This tendency held for both cognates and noncognates. Unlike noncognates, however, gender-incongruent cognates yielded more errors than gender-congruent cognates. These results are interpreted as evidence for an L1-L2 shared gender system with L2 cognates relying more heavily on the L1 gender value.[1] In this paper the term bilingual is used in its wider sense to denote a person who possesses and regularly uses two languages in any degree

Classifying intermediate Learner English: a data driven approach to learner corpora

We demonstrate how data-driven approaches to learner corpora can support Second Language Acquisition research when integrated with visualisation tools. We present a visual interface supporting the investigation of a set of automatically determined features discriminating between pass and fail FCE exam scripts provided by Briscoe et.al. (2010) 1. We illustrate how the interface can support the investigation of individual features. Analysis of the most discriminative features indicates that development of grammatical categories allowing reference to complex events and referents and discourse relations is a crucial property of the upper intermediate level