Peter M Ecke

About

Peter M. Ecke is a Professor of Second Language Acquisition and German in the Department of German Studies. His teaching encompasses applied linguistics, second language acquisition, multilingualism, intercultural communication, testing and assessment, and German language and culture. He is a faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Ecke's research interests include second and third language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition, language attrition, bilingual speech including lexical errors and word finding problems, and the effects of study abroad on language and intercultural competence development. His work explores the learning and teaching of German in the United States, with a focus on intercultural communication, language attrition, and assessment practices. Ecke has contributed to the understanding of vocabulary learning, cross-linguistic influence, and the costs of multilingualism, and has examined the impact of study abroad programs on language proficiency and intercultural competence. He teaches courses designed to prepare students for intercultural communication challenges and to foster multilingual skills, emphasizing practical applications in education, tourism, business, and healthcare contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Cognitive science
• Pedagogy
• Medicine
• Medical education
• Mathematics education
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Parasitic vocabulary acquisition, cross-linguistic influence, and lexical retrieval in multilinguals

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2014-01-07 · 96 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The first part of this paper reviews research evidence for typological similarity and/or L2 status as determinants of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in multilingual lexical production. The second part presents a model of vocabulary acquisition as a framework to explain CLI at the levels of form, (syntactic) frame, and meaning, as well as some of the developmental changes that have been reported for CLI patterns in relation to L3 learners’ proficiency. It is suggested that these patterns can be…

  PublisherDOI

• Learners' Implicit Assumptions About Syntactic Frames in New L3 Words: The Role of Cognates, Typological Proximity, and L2 Status

  Language Learning · 2009-02-19 · 75 citations

  article

  Learners of third language (L3) German and L3 French studied unfamiliar verbs that were cognate with first language (L1) Spanish equivalents, second language (L2) English equivalents, or neither. We examined whether learners would assume that the verbs shared syntactic frames with cognate forms in the typologically closer language. In immediate tests, verbs were preferentially judged grammatical in cognate frames, with verbs in typologically closer French yielding a stronger effect for Spanish f…

  PublisherDOI

• Student Expectations, Motivations, Target Language Use, and Perceived Learning Progress in a Summer Study Abroad Program in Germany

  Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German · 2009-03-01 · 64 citations

  articleSenior author

  This study investigated students' motives for participating in a short‐term study abroad program in Germany, their expectations about learning progress at the beginning of the program, and their perceived progress in various language skills at the end of the program. Findings indicated that students' expectations were higher than their perceived progress in all skills with the exception of cultural learning. Correlations were found between reported frequency of listening in the L2 and gains in L…

  PublisherDOI

• Tracking tip-of-the-tongue states in a multilingual speaker: Evidence of attrition or instability in lexical systems?

  International Journal of Bilingualism · 2012-08-09 · 58 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How stable or how permeable to attrition are a multilingual’s first and second languages during life periods characterized by dynamic changes in language-use frequencies? This longitudinal study sheds some light on this issue by investigating changing patterns in a multilingual speaker’s tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Over a period of 10 years, the multilingual recorded more than 100 TOT states, together with 400 non-target word associations, as they occurred with words from the speaker’s five…

  PublisherDOI

• O modelo parasita da aquisição do vocabulário de L2 e L3: evidência de estudos naturais e experimentais

  Fórum Linguístico · 2014-09-20 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper reviews evidence for the Parasitic Model of Vocabulary Acquisition for second and third language learners/developing multilinguals. It first describes the model’s predictions about default processes based on the detection and use of similarity at the three stages involved in the development of individual lexical items: (1) the establishing of a form representation, (2) the building of connections to syntactic frame and concept representations, and (3) the strengthening and automatizat…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher J. Hall

  10 shared

• Tina Badstübner

  4 shared

• Ronald Simon

  Universität Hamburg

  2 shared

• Margit Fisch

  University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

  2 shared

• Jürgen Handke

  2 shared

• Elena Bady

  University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

  2 shared

• Viktoria Ahlburg

  University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

  2 shared

• Sarah Minner

  Universität Hamburg

  2 shared

Labs

• Second Language Acquisition and TeachingPI

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