Acquisition of prepositions by late second language learners: a psycholinguistic approach

Abstract

Second language learners struggle to acquire prepositions and they tend to find the choice of prepositions used in the target language arbitrary. They also seem to resort to direct translations of the prepositions used in their L1 when such translation is available. The present study aims to provide psycholinguistic evidence that these difficulties are due to language-specific conceptualisations of words.