Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The first language of a person has been shown to influence the processing of words when they learn a new language. Thishas been previously researched in behavioral studies, as well as by using lexical distributions or co-occurrence countsbetween word combinations to detect errors. In this paper we follow the findings of two recent studies and test theirhypotheses within the framework of two different word embedding models, based on their representation of the erroneoususage of concent words. Using an error-annotated corpus of essays written by learnings bellowing to 16 different firstlanguages, we compare incorrect words and their correct replacements as vectors in English and the learners first language.The results are consistent with previous findings that the first language has an influence on errors in the second language.The relationships between typologically similar languages differed between the models of embedding, suggesting anavenue for future explorations.