This study investigates the effects of simplification, type of linguistic item, and second language experience on learners' intake of linguistic items contained in written input. Learners at two levels of language experience were exposed to one of the following four conditions: a simplified or unsimplified reading passage with the present perfect tense form or a simplified or unsimplified reading passage with the present subjunctive form. To measure learners' intake, a repeated-measures analysis of variance was performed on the raw scores obtained on a task consisting of a pre- and posttest. The tests were a multiple-choice recognition assessment task. Significant main effects were found for type of passage and language experience, and there was a significant interaction between type of passage and task. Results suggest that simplification does not have a facilitating effect on learners' intake and that learners at different levels demonstrate a different pattern of performance while internalizing written input. Implications for pedagogical written materials and future research are also discussed.

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.

Although many theoretical issues revolving around implicit and explicit knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition hinge on the ability to measure these two types of knowledge, few empirical studies have attempted to do so. However, R. Ellis (2005) did develop a battery of tests intended to provide relatively separate measures. This study aims to validate the use of Ellis’s test battery in an English as a foreign language context and to investigate the extent of Chinese first-year university students’ implicit and explicit L2 knowledge. Test scores loaded on two factors, as in R. Ellis (2005), thus demonstrating construct validity for the tests as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge in a population of Chinese university-level learners of English in a Chinese (as opposed to English as a second language) context. These learners were found to have higher scores on measures of explicit knowledge than on those of implicit knowledge because of the instruction they had received and their English learning environment.

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production.We thank Yasuhiro Shirai for organizing the workshop on second language acquisition of RCs at Cornell University in January 2006, where this paper was presented, as well as for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We thank all the participants at the workshop and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their comments. Additional feedback offered by William O'Grady, Salikoko Mufwene, and John Whitman is greatly appreciated and hereby acknowledged. We thank our children for their contributions to this paper and all of the members of our research team who have contributed to this work—in particular, Uta Lam for her technical assistance. This research has been fully supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project Nos. HKU336/94H, CUHK4002/97H, CUHK4014/02H, and CUHK 4692/05H) and direct grants from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (01/02, 03/04).

This experimental study on English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages investigates the interaction of universal principles and L1 knowledge in interlanguage grammars by focusing on verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation (such as break in English). These verbs have the same lexico-semantic composition, but differ crosslinguistically as to how they encode the alternation morphologically. Results of a picture judgment task show that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners of Turkish, Spanish, and English with different L1s rely on a universal mechanism when learning transitivity alternations. L1 influence plays a prominent role in the morphological realization of the alternation. These findings suggest that UG and L1 knowledge may not affect all linguistic domains in the same way at a given stage of development. It is proposed that transfer is subject to modularity in interlanguage grammars.

This paper examines the sources of miscommunication in a videotaped tutoring session involving a native speaker of Korean and a native speaker of U.S. English. Analysis revealed an initial nonmutual interpretation of participant role and status. These divergent interpretations appear to have resulted from the Korean tutor's transfer of a Korean conversational routine, which he defined as involving polite speaker modesty, to the U.S. English context. The initial conflicting interpretations are maintained and solidified by additional mismatches in discourse management strategies, schema, and contextualization cues. The cumulative effect of these mismatches was the judgment on the part of each of the interlocutors that the other was uncooperative.

This paper reports on a test of the validity of Pienemann's (1998) Processability Theory (PT). This theory predicts that certain morphological and syntactic phenomena are acquired in a fixed sequence. Three phenomena were chosen for this study: attributive adjective morphology, predicative adjective morphology, and subordinate clause syntax (placement of negation). These phenomena are located at successive developmental stages in the hierarchy predicted by PT. We test whether they actually do appear in this predicted hierarchical order in the L2 of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish learners. The three languages mentioned are very closely related and have the same adjective morphology and subordinate clause syntax. We can, therefore, treat them as one language for the purposes of this study. Three analyses have been carried out: The first follows Pienemann's theory and is concerned only with syntactic levels; the second is a semantic analysis of the acquisition of number versus that of gender; the third analysis studies the various kinds of mismatches between the inflection of the noun, the controller, and the adjective. The results are the following: The first test supports PT as it has been described by Pienemann. The second analysis shows that there is an acquisitional hierarchy such that number is acquired before gender (in adjectives), and the mismatch analysis raises questions about the fundamental assumptions of the theory.

This investigation of NS–NNS interaction in same- and cross-gender dyads on four information exchange tasks revealed that male and female NNSs made and received a comparable number of opportunities to request L2 input and modify interlanguage output during interaction with female NSs, but during interaction with male NSs, these opportunities were significantly lower for female than for male NNSs. In addition, more request-response exchanges were found on tasks in which either the NS or the NNS was given initial control over task-related information. Findings of the study were attributed to cultural similarities and differences in the interactional behaviors of the participants.

Building on the cognitive and interactive perspectives of task research, the cognition hypothesis states that increasing task complexity promotes greater interaction and feedback and thus facilitates second language (L2) development (Robinson, 2001b, 2007a). To date, very little research has explored this claim during learner-learner interactions in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom contexts in which a task-based syllabus is implemented. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of task complexity on the occurrence of interaction-driven learning opportunities and question development in such a classroom context. Korean university students (N = 191) from four intact English classes were randomly assigned to one comparison group and three experimental groups with various task-complexity levels (i.e., simple, +complex, and ++complex) based on Robinson’s framework. Their interactions were audiorecorded, and occurrences of learning opportunities, operationalized as language-related episodes (LREs), were identified. Question development was identified between pretest and posttests on the basis of the learners’ stage advancement using Pienemann and Johnston’s (1987) developmental sequence. Results indicated that more complex tasks promoted a greater number of LREs and particularly led to LREs targeting developmentally advanced question structures, which result in question development.

In this paper, various definitions of markedness are discussed, including the difference in the assumptions underlying psychological and linguistic approaches to markedness. It is proposed that if one adopts a definition derived from theories of language learnability, then the second language learner's prior linguistic experience may predispose him or her towards transferring marked structures from the first language to the second, contrary to usual assumptions in the literature that suggest that second language learners will avoid marked forms. To test this hypothesis, adult and child learners of French as a second language were tested using grammaticality judgment tasks on two marked structures, preposition stranding and the double object construction, which are grammatical in English but ungrammatical in French, to see if they would accept French versions of these structures. It was found that the second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in French but did accept the double object construction, suggesting that transfer takes place only with one of the two marked structures. In addition, the children took tests on these structures in their native language to see if they perceived them as in any sense psycholinguistically marked. Results show that they do not treat marked and unmarked structures differently in the native language. It is suggested that the concept of markedness may cover a range of phenomena that need to be further clarified and investigated.

In this paper the concept of “lexical unit” as proposed by Cruse (1986) is introduced in the context of L2 vocabulary learning to replace the rather vague notion of “word.” In the first part of the paper, this concept is defined in terms of lexical semantics and then applied to the L2 learning task. The second part describes two experimental studies in which the learning of different types of lexical units is examined. In the first study, totally new lexical units are compared with multiword items that are made up of familiar forms. In the second experiment, different types of new senses of familiar forms are compared. Both studies underscore the importance of knowledge of form—but not of previously learned meaning—for the learning of new meanings for familiar forms.

If one would ask me as a regular, though not systematic reader in applied linguistics to mention a major theoretical issue in this field of study, I would choose for the controversy about “behavioristic” audiolingual learning versus “mentalistic” cognitive code learning. This dichotomy is apparent in many theoretical papers, and starting point of various research programs.

This article reports an empirical study in which we explored the role played by two forms of feedback—error correction and model texts—on child English as a foreign language learners’ reported noticing and written output. The study was carried out with 11- and 12-year-old children placed in proficiency-matched pairs who engaged in a three-stage collaborative writing task involving (a) spontaneous noticing of linguistic problems while composing, (b) comparison of their texts with the feedback provided, and (c) rewriting of their original output. Results indicate that although the children noticed and later incorporated mainly lexical features into their output, gains in the linguistic acceptability and comprehensibility of their revised texts showed an advantage for error correction over models. Learners in the error correction condition reported more noticing of grammar at the comparison stage, which later emerged in their revisions. The potential effects of both feedback strategies on children’s reported noticing and output production are discussed, and conclusions are drawn for the role of feedback in children’s classroom second language acquisition.

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the hypothesis that there are fundamental differences between using language in different situations or for different purposes, and that these differences may be accounted for in terms of the requirement of the task to be solved on the basis of knowledge represented in a particular way.

The literature exploring the executive function correlates of bilingualism is vast, but to date, few studies have concentrated on children, for whom the bilingual advantage appears even more inconsistent than for adults. We investigate a highly heterogeneous group of children (in terms of bilingual experience and socioeconomic status) and identify the critical threshold of bilingual experience from which an advantage can be observed at group level. The modeling methods adopted allow the use of fine-grained, continuous factors for age and socioeconomic status, thereby effectively controlling for their effect and isolating the specific effect of bilingual experience. We pioneer the use of Cox Proportional Hazard regression to analyze performance in the Simon task. This allows the modeling of all data points without transformation or outlier removal, and captures both accuracy and reaction time within the same analysis, while being able to handle multiple predictor variables.

In a paired-associate learning (PAL) task, Dutch university students (n = 129) learned 20 English second language (L2) idioms either receptively or productively (i.e., L2-first language [L1] or L1-L2) and were tested in two directions (i.e., recognition or production) immediately after learning and 3 weeks later. Receptive and productive performance was affected by direction of learning. This finding parallels findings from PAL experiments on L2 individual-word learning. On a productive test, productive learners had a sizable advantage over receptive learners, whereas on recognition, receptive learners outperformed productive learners. Two idiom characteristics, imageability (capacity to evoke a mental image) and transparency (overlap between literal and figurative meaning), as assessed in a norming study by an independent sample (n = 80), qualified these findings. Indicating the importance of dual coding in idiom learning, imageability predicted performance, and receptive learning was particularly inefficient for low imageable idioms. Transparency was a weaker predictor of performance and only affected recognition.This study is based on the first author's MA research. We would like to thank the four anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. Any errors or omissions remain our own.

The main purpose of the current study was to examine the relative significance of vocabulary knowledge (VK) and syntactic knowledge (SK) in second language (L2) listening ability, while accounting for the effect of several cognitive and affective factors. A total of 263 English-as-a-foreign-language learners took a standardized listening test (IELTS), as well as a battery of nine linguistic (two aural SK tests and two aural VK tests—covering both breadth and depth of VK), cognitive (two working memory tests and a metacognitive knowledge questionnaire), and affective measures (two L2 listening anxiety questionnaires). Structural equation modeling analysis revealed that both VK and SK were significant predictors of L2 listening ability; however, VK was a stronger predictor with an effect size being almost twice as much as the one for SK (.55 vs. .28). The results also showed that metacognitive knowledge, working memory, and L2 listening anxiety are significant predictors of L2 listening ability.

This study of five native speakers of Korean investigates the role of universals in their acquisition of English obstruent voicing contrasts. The data were gathered from a passage and a word list containing voiced and voiceless obstruents in initial, medial, and final word positions. Results reflected principles of markedness universals of L1 acquisition and adult natural languages, suggesting that interlanguage systems behave according to universals of natural languages.

A delayed mimicry paradigm was used to assess speakers′ awareness of non-distinctive phonetic differences which in part distinguish languages. The notion of “phonological filtering” implies that second language learners may not be able to perceive phonetic differences between their native language and a foreign language unless the phonetic differences are linguistically relevant in the native language. If cross-language phonetic differences are in fact perceived poorly, it is unlikely that phonetic modification will occur in the course of naturalistic second language acquisition. In this study native English speakers familiar with Spanish-accented English attempted to read sentences with a Spanish accent. Acoustic measurements showed that two phonetic characteristics of English—the long VOT values associated with /p, t, k/ and final-syllable lengthening—were altered in the direction of Spanish and Spanish-accented English. These results provide tentative evidence that non-distinctive phonetic differences between languages are detectable by language learners and thus do not present an insuperable barrier to phonetic learning in second language acquisition.