While L1 transfer and L2 learnability have been studied extensively in the domain of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, purely semantic phenomena have received little attention in the L2 literature. This paper presents two experiments examining the relative scope assigned to disjunction and negation by English-speaking learners of Japanese…

The nature of the initial state in second-language (L2) acquisition is a much debated but still unresolved issue, due in part to the empirical problem of obtaining production data from L2 learners at very early stages in development. In an attempt to circumvent this problem, this article presents evidence from a comprehension-based experiment…