This study examined how English learners in second-language (SL) and foreign-language (FL) contexts employ tense backshifting in indirect reported speech. Participants included 35 international students in the United States, 37 Bulgarian speakers of English, 38 Bosnian speakers of English, and 41 native English speakers. The instrument involved speech scenarios in two time settings—immediate and delayed report—and questions about the participants’ reasons for backshifting tenses or not. The results revealed that FL environments foster the acquisition of backshifting as an automatically applicable grammatical rule, whereas SL contexts facilitate awareness of pragmatic and semantic aspects of tense backshifting.

The traditional implicit learning literature has focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been recently directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for implicit learning of a mapping between a novel set of determiners and thematic roles, obtained using a newly developed reaction time methodology. The results conclude that contextually derived form-meaning connections might be implicitly learned.

In response to new theoretical claims and inconclusive empirical findings regarding relative clauses in East Asian languages, this study examined the factors relevant to relative clause production by Korean heritage speakers. Gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (± animate), and the topicality of head nouns (± topicalization) were manipulated as experimental variables, and factors that appear to have been confounded in previous studies (e.g., context, proficiency) were controlled for or measured. Data were collected from Korean native and heritage speakers using an elicited production task. Group results failed to show a subject advantage, but individual analysis revealed that the effect of gap position varied for speakers at different levels of Korean proficiency. Results from the topicalized lead-in condition as well as error analysis revealed two different sources related to these patterns: Traditional asymmetry (i.e., subject advantage) appears to reflect the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy effect, whereas backward asymmetry (i.e., object advantage) seems to stem from word order strategy. Proficiency scores exhibited a modest correlation with the different individual response patterns. However, an animacy effect was not observed. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of a general learning strategy, language universals based on informational prominence, the role of proficiency, and the effect of task demands.

This review examines whether similarity between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) influences the (morpho)syntactic processing of the L2, using both neural location and temporal processing information. Results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) studies show that nonnative speakers can exhibit nativelike online L2 (morpho)syntactic processing behavior and neural patterns. These findings are contrary to predictions of the shallow structure hypothesis for syntactic processing (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b). The data are in line with predictions of the (morpho)syntactic domain of the unified competition model of L2 acquisition (MacWhinney, 2005): Differences in L2 processing as compared to the L1 (or to native speakers of the L2) were generally associated with constructions that were crosslinguistically dissimilar or unique to the L2. The processing of crosslinguistically similar constructions generally produced no differences in brain activity between the L1 and L2. Overall, the available data suggest that cross-language similarity is an important factor that influences L2 (morpho)syntactic processing.