This study investigates second language acquisition of English noun phrases in discourse, examining the effect of discourse markedness and structural markedness on the development of noun phrase use. English L2 noun phrase forms are examined within three universal discourse contexts: current, known, and new reference to topics. The targeted noun phrases forms include ø anaphora, pronouns and nouns with markers of definiteness and indefiniteness, including left dislocation and existential phrases. Based on expectedness within discourse, the least marked discourse context is reference to a current topic, and the most marked context is the introduction of a new referent as topic. Based on formal complexity, ø anaphora is the least marked structural form, and left-dislocated and existential noun phrases are the most marked. Free production and elicited imitation recall tasks, involving picture sequences that manipulated the three discourse contexts, were used to test Japanese learners' acquisition of noun phrase forms. They were evaluated by comparison with NS production. The results support predictions that L2 learners distinguish between discourse contexts, acquiring more targetlike forms in the least marked context first, and that they acquire the least marked structural forms earlier than the more marked ones.

Timed grammaticality judgment tests (TGJT) and oral elicited imitation tests (OEIT) are considered reliable and valid measures of implicit linguistic knowledge, but studies consistently observe better performances on the TGJT than the OEIT due to the different types of processing they require: comprehension for the TGJT and production for the OEIT. This study examines whether degree of access to implicit knowledge is a function of processing type. Results from a series of factor analyses suggest that the OEIT requires greater access to implicit knowledge—implying that it measures stronger implicit knowledge—than the TGJT. Furthermore, the study examines effects on construct validity of time pressure in the OEIT (uncontrolled vs. controlled) and modality in the TGJT (written vs. aural). The results indicate that the tests reached higher construct validity, or measured stronger implicit knowledge, when the OEIT employed controlled time pressure and the TGJT used aural stimuli.

This study examines the generalizability of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993b) by investigating the relative effect of two types of explicit grammar instruction on learners' ability to interpret and produce sentences containing the French causative. Nine classes of 179 fourth-semester French students were assigned to three groups: (a) processing instruction, (b) traditional instruction, and (c) no instruction. The results indicate that processing instruction is as effective as traditional instruction in enabling learners to interpret the French causative and that traditional instruction is more effective in enabling learners to produce the French causative.

The relationship between prior knowledge of and interest in a topic is complex. Although knowledge and interest may often go hand in hand, they do not necessarily correlate. The purpose of this study was to separate the effects of prior knowledge and topic interest on second language reading comprehension. Participants in the study were 104 students of English as a second language in an English-for-academic-purposes program at a large American university. On the basis of a prior-knowledge test and a topic-interest inventory, each student read passages and took multiple-choice comprehension tests on topics for which they had all four possible combinations of high and low topic interest and high and low prior knowledge. Results on the reading comprehension measure for the two main effects of prior knowledge and topic interest, although in the expected direction, did not reach significance, possibly because of a significant interaction between those two variables. There was also a significant effect for English proficiency level, as well as a significant interaction between interest and gender, with males more influenced by high topic interest than females. Our results are compared to those of other first and second language studies that have explicitly investigated the interrelationships among topic interest, prior knowledge, and gender.

It has been known since at least the 1960s that small changes in pupil diameter in response to a mental task are indicative of processing effort associated with this task. More recently, with the advent of modern eye-trackers, which also measure the pupil diameter, pupillometry has been “rediscovered” by language researchers and the method has since been used in many different subdisciplines of linguistics. This article gives a nonexhaustive overview about recent linguistic research with the purpose of introducing researchers in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) to pupillometry. In addition, the article discusses things to consider when designing an experiment and how pupil data can be analyzed. The range of possibilities in which pupillometry can be used in experimental SLA research makes it a welcome addition to other online methods such as eye-tracking and event-related potentials.

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was the learning target. The first group of participants received receptive training, the second group received receptive and productive training, and a third group served as a control. The control group received no training of the target structure and only read an explanation of the target structure rule. Receptive knowledge was assessed with a self-paced listening test, a match-mismatch test, and a grammaticality judgment task. Productive knowledge was tested with a picture description task in single- and dual-task conditions. A postexperimental questionnaire tested whether any explicit knowledge had been induced. Results suggest that the receptive and receptive + productive training programs succeeded in building a knowledge base that was used in comprehension but much less so in production. These results will be interpreted in light of processing and the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge.I would like to express my gratitude to Jan Hulstijn and Rob Schoonen from the University of Amsterdam for their supervision. I would also like to thank the two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their comments and Nick Ellis for taking time to discuss this project with me.

This article investigates the information structure of verb-second (V2) declaratives in Swedish, German, and nonnative German. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called prefield, the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we have found language-specific patterns in native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially between German and Swedish, and Swedish postpones new (rhematic) information and instead fills the prefield with given (thematic) elements and elements of no or low informational value (e.g., expletives) to a far greater extent than German. We compare Swedish learners of German to native controls matched for age and genre (Bohnacker, 2005, 2006; Rosén, 2006). These learners master the syntactic properties of V2 but start their sentences in nonnative ways. They overapply the Swedish principle of rheme later in their second language German, indicating first language (L1) transfer at the interface of syntax and information structure, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1.

This paper is intended as a programmatic contribution to the work of a number of scholars in second language acquisition (SLA) who are attempting to explain various facts about SLA in terms of an interaction between native-language transfer and language universals (Gass & Selinker, 1983). In the present paper, some of the theoretical assumptions and consequences of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman, 1977) are discussed in comparison with the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Crucial differences between the two hypotheses are presented, and empirical evidence in favor of the MDH is reviewed. Pedagogical implications of the MDH are then taken up, and a strategy for interlanguage-intervention is discussed in light of an empirical study. Finally, several problems for the MDH which have been proposed in the literature are considered.

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle, and end points of the project, analyzed for global, segmental, syllabic, prosodic, and temporal aspects of L2 pronunciation, and linked to their aptitude and experience profiles. Results indicated that the participants generally enhanced the global comprehensibility of their speech (through reducing vowel insertion errors in complex syllables) as a function of increased classroom experience during their first semester, and explicit learning aptitude (associative memory, phonemic coding) appeared to help certain learners further enhance their pronunciation proficiency through the development of fluency and prosody. In the second semester, incidental learning ability (sound sequence recognition) was shown to be a significant predictor of the extent to which certain learners continued to improve and ultimately attain advanced-level L2 comprehensibility, largely thanks to improved segmental accuracy.

This study investigates the relationship between foreign language aptitude and the learning of two English structures defined as easy or difficult to learn. Using a quasiexperimental design, 66 secondary-level learners of English as a foreign language from three intact classes were provided with four hours of instruction on the passive (a difficult structure) and the past progressive (an easy structure). Language aptitude was measured using the LLAMA Aptitude Test (Meara, 2005). Language outcomes were measured with a written grammaticality judgment and an oral production task. The results revealed that one of the aptitude components, grammatical inferencing, contributed to learners’ gains on the passive but not the past progressive on the written measure. Another component of aptitude, associative memory, contributed to learners’ gains on the past progressive on the oral measure. The results provide support for the claim that different components of aptitude contribute to the learning of difficult and easy L2 structures in different ways. There is also support for the proposal that different components of aptitude may be involved at different stages of language acquisition (Skehan, 2002).

This study investigates whether conceptualizable agents in the discourse play a role in English L2 overpassivization errors (nontargetlike passivization of unaccusative verbs, a subclass of intransitives). It hypothesizes that learners are more likely to make overpassivization errors in externally caused events (in which an agent or cause may form part of the speaker's mental representation) than in internally caused events (in which the cause or causer of the event is not clear). Advanced Chinese learners of English were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences with unaccusative verbs. Each target sentence was embedded in two different contexts expressing external and internal causation. A significant difference in error rates was found between the two different contexts: Learners accepted passivized unaccusative verbs more frequently when an agent or cause was available than when it was not. This finding is taken as an indication that learners transitivize unaccusative verbs before they passivize them and that the degree of transitivization varies depending on the presence of conceptualizable agents in the discourse. Thus this paper argues against a purely syntactic analysis of interlanguage errors such as overpassivization and in favor of an approach that takes cognitive factors into account.

Over the last 40 years, there have been successive attempts to define or refine a set of key concepts intended to guide theory and experimentation in SLA. These include input, intake, and consciousness. This article tries to take these attempts a stage further by integrating the conceptualization of these notions into a larger interdisciplinary framework called Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL). Past work, which is problematic both in terms of the theoretical development itself and in terms of the way the resulting ideas have been applied, is critically reviewed. A reinterpretation of key concepts in MOGUL terms is presented, in hopes that this reformulation will provide a clearer theoretical understanding and serve as an improved foundation for future research.

In this study we examined language learners’ attentional processing of a target syntactic construction in written L2 input in different input conditions, the change in learners’ knowledge of the targeted construction in these conditions, and the relationship between the change in knowledge and attentional processing. One hundred L2 learners of English in Sri Lanka were divided into four experimental groups and control group: input flood, input enhancement, a specific instruction to pay attention to the target grammatical construction in the input, and an explicit metalinguistic explanation of the target construction. Eye tracking was used to collect data on the attentional processing of 45 participants in the sample. The eye-tracking measures of learners who received a specific instruction to pay attention to the target structure and an explicit metalinguistic explanation indicated increased attentional processing. The learners in these groups also improved their knowledge of the target structure significantly. The results suggest that increased attentional processing is needed for development in L2 grammatical knowledge and that explicit instruction to pay attention to the input and metalinguistic explanation are successful in directing learners’ attentional resources toward novel grammatical constructions in the input.

Previous studies have shown that it is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to overcome the effects of transfer when they need to unlearn specific aspects of the native language in the absence of explicit input that indicates which properties of the first language (L1) are ruled out by the L2 grammar (Inagaki, 2001; Westergaard, 2003; White, 1991a, 1991b). The present study focuses on the effects of transfer in the domain of aspectual semantics through an investigation of the interpretation of the present progressive in L2 English and the imperfective marker te-iru in L2 Japanese and examines whether L2 learners can rule out interpretations available in the L1 but not in the L2. Japanese learners of English (n = 101), English native-speaker controls (n = 23), English learners of Japanese (n = 31), and Japanese native-speaker controls (n = 33) completed an interpretation task in English or Japanese. The results show that the L2 Japanese learners were more successful than the L2 English learners in both acquiring the semantics of the imperfective in the L2 and ruling out interpretations available only in the L1. It is proposed that successful unlearning depends on both the grammatical complexity of the semantic target in the L2 and the transparency of the input cues available to the learner.

The present study examines the processing of Spanish future tense morphology incidentally while reading in a second language. Previous L1 and L2 reading research has demonstrated that readers can acquire new vocabulary as a result of reading, but can they also acquire formal properties of the second language grammatical system? The participants in the present study had no previous knowledge of future tense morphology such that, as they read the passage used in the study, they encountered the target form for the first time, which is an accented á on the end of an infinitive—for example, dependerá “he, she, or it will depend.” Several variables were manipulated: (a) the frequency with which the target form appeared in the input passages (6, 10, or 16 exposures); (b) the learner-readers' orientation to the task (neutral, meaning oriented, or form oriented); and (c) cues to meaning (the presence or absence of future-oriented adverbials). The effects of these variables were measured on both comprehension and input processing immediately after reading, 2 weeks later, and 1 month later. Comprehension was measured with a free-written recall and a multiple-choice comprehension test. Input processing was measured with a multiple-choice form recognition test and a modified cloze-form production test. The results indicate that all three variables have some effect on comprehension and input processing.

This paper examines the expression of temporality in the basilang speech (the earliest stage of second language development) of five subjects. Temporality is studied from three perspectives: morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. The first analysis determined the subjects' degree of target-like use of English morphology and demonstrated that these basilang speakers generally lack verb phrase morphology and do not have a tense system. The second analysis examined the subjects' utterances in terms of sentence-level semantics, classifying utterances according to (universal) categories such as completive versus non-completive action, habitual versus continuous action, and action versus states. The analysis showed that none of the subjects studied made tense or aspectual distinctions and that temporal marking was not accomplished by the form of the verb. The third analysis examined how temporal reference was made by the adverbials (now, tomorrow, always, prepositional phrases), serialization (the fixing of a temporal reference point and allowing the sequence of utterances to reflect the actual temporal order of reported events), calendric reference (dates, days of the week, months, and numbers), and implicit reference (temporal reference inferred from a particular context or situation). This taxonomy captured the expression of time at the basilang level of interlanguage development much better than the previous two analyses.

This study investigates some instances of linguistic development in the acquisition of a second language that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. First, the notion of grammaticalization is discussed with reference to the current linguistic debate and its applicability to the domain of language acquisition is evaluated. Then, some cases are examined drawing on data on the acquisition of Italian collected during several years at the University of Pavia. With respect to temporality and modality, learners are shown to move from lexical means or context-dependent strategies to a gradual acquisition of the morphological devices required by the target language. The results of the analyses are discussed in terms of their implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research.

The amount of influence that a learner's native language has on the acquisition of a second language is an issue which has received considerable attention in research on second language acquisition. The thesis of this paper is that, within the context of the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker 1972) and the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman 1977), some important properties of a learner's interlanguage (IL) can be predicted.

More specifically, it is shown that speakers of Cantonese and Japanese internalize different IL rules in attempting to deal with English word-final voice contrasts. Whereas speakers of Cantonese devoice word-final obstruents in the target language, Japanese speakers insert a word-final schwa after the voiced obstruent. However, each of these rules can be correlated with facts about the phonology of the native language, supporting the conclusion that some important aspects of ILs can be predicted on the basis of a comparison of the native and target languages.

Despite the frequency with which verbal reports are used in SLA to gather data on learners' cognitive processes (e.g., Bowles, 2003, 2004; Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000; Rosa & Leow, 2004a, 2004b), only two studies (Bowles & Leow, 2005; Leow & Morgan-Short, 2004) have investigated verbal reports' reactivity (i.e., whether they alter cognitive processes) during second language (L2) reading. This is the first study to investigate the reactivity of verbal reports on a L2 problem-solving task. First-semester learners of Spanish were assigned to one of six experimental conditions, which differed in terms of the type of verbalization (i.e., metalinguistic, nonmetalinguistic, or silent) and the type of feedback (i.e., implicit vs. explicit). Results show that metalinguistic verbalization significantly increased time on task and also hindered participants' ability to produce exemplars of the target structure seen during the experimental task. However, neither type of verbalization significantly affected participants' ability to produce novel exemplars of the target structure, and there was no interaction between verbalization and feedback.

This study investigates the interrelationship of phonological similarity between L1 and L2, transfer, and markedness as they relate to the acquisition of English /ε/ and /æ/ by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Transfer and markedness adequately account for the behavior of poorer learners, but these factors do not explain the rate of acquisition of the two sounds as assessed by global foreign accent: Whereas /æ/ accuracy increased as global accent improved, /ε/ accuracy decreased. It is suggested that phonetic and phonological similarity between L1 and L2 are important factors which motivated overgeneralization or interaction of /ε/ and /æ/ within the inter-language.