This study examines the second language (L2) development of variable /s/-weakening in the spontaneous speech of L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad in either Dominican Republic, where /s/-weakening is widespread, or central Spain, where /s/-weakening is much less common. Learners’ realizations of /s/ were coded impressionistically and acoustically by measuring voicing, center of gravity, and duration. The results show that regardless of the study abroad location, students did not change the amount of sibilance they produced over time. However, they became more nativelike with respect to /s/-voicing and duration. Additionally, whereas some linguistic factors were found to significantly constrain /s/-weakening across groups, learners did not gain sensitivity to all factors that constrain native-speaker /s/-weakening. Findings suggest that exposure to /s/-weakening during a semester abroad is insufficient for learners to adopt this sociolinguistic variable and other social and cognitive factors likely mitigate its integration into the L2 learners’ phonological systems.

Felix (1988) claimed to demonstrate that UG-based knowledge of grammaticality causes nonnative speakers (NNSs) to have more accurate grammaticality judgments on sentences that are ungrammatical according to UG than on those that are grammatical. Birdsong (1994) criticized the methodology employed, noting that it ignores “response bias” (a propensity to judge sentences as ungrammatical) as a potential explanation. Felix and Zobl (1994) dismissed this criticism as merely methodological. In this paper, Birdsong's criticism is upheld by considering a statistical model of the data. At the same time, a more complete logistic regression model allows a fuller statistical analysis, revealing tentative support for the asymmetry claim, as well as differential learning states for different constructions and a tendency toward transfer avoidance. These theoretically significant effects were unnoticed in the earlier discussion of this research. For SLA research on grammaticality judgments to proceed fruitfully, appropriate statistical models need to be considered in designing the research.

This volume contains 10 original chapters reflecting research and discussion on the issue of focus on form (FonF) in second language instruction. As the editors point out in the preface, it is timely now to discuss and clarify terminology and research issues in FonF studies, mainly because of the diversity of reactions to this construct. The central aim of the chapters is to explore the nature and feasibility of FonF and their intended audience is second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and language teaching practitioners, as well as graduate students in the field of applied linguistics.

During the course of each day, we meet many people and form quick judgments about not only their mood and general intelligence, but about their character and social background as well. Personal appearance, facial expression, body movement, and linguistic cues are but a few of the sources of data that we interpret. It has been a matter of much debate in the last fifty years as to whether these data are cross-culturally significant, or whether they have meaning only within a given cultural milieu. This study was an attempt to determine if linguistic cues of social status have such a cross-cultural significance.

These books represent two of the most recent additions to the growing number of introductory texts designed to be used as main or supporting resources in academic courses on pragmatics. Although each is intended for use by readers with little or no background in the field, they differ considerably.

WORKING WITH DISCOURSE: MEANING BEYOND THE CLAUSE. J. R. Martin and David Rose (Eds.). New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. 293. $125.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

As someone with only a scant background in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), acquired in passing through my work with teachers of English to speakers of other languages, I was curious to see how far this volume achieved its stated aims of describing a relatively accessible set of tools for discourse analysis informed by SFL and enabling discourse analysts to use them. My previous encounters with SFL suggested that these aims were worthy but ambitious. Indeed, although the back cover reassures us that the reader needs “no prior experience of functional linguistics,” the book is in fact written more like a handbook for readers already drawn to and familiar with the paradigm rather than as an introduction for those who are curious but uninitiated. This impression comes chiefly from the monologic stance that the authors acknowledge they have taken. That is, to make a particular “set of tools more available than they have been in the past” they have concentrated on “a tool-kit informed from just one point of view” (p. 273). The result is a resource that will be enormously useful for those who already know that they want to use these tools but less convincing for neophytes who need first to be persuaded of their usefulness.

Morrison (this issue) criticized the analytical and statistical methods that Escudero and Boersma (2004) used for assessing the participants' cue weightings in their listening experiments. He proposed that logistic regression constitutes a better method for measuring perceptual cue weighting than Escudero and Boersma's “edge difference ratio.” The present paper starts by summarizing and illustrating Escudero and Boersma's experiment and analysis method and then addresses five of Morrison's objections—namely the alleged ceiling effect, the alleged superiority of logistic regression, the problem of discarding data, the (dis)confirmation of two-category assimilation, and Escudero and Boersma's grouping of the data. We will argue that although logistic regression is a very good method for measuring cue weighting, there was nothing wrong with Escudero and Boersma's methodology in these five respects.

This study examined the extent to which L2 writers with varied working memory display differential pausing and revision behaviors at different periods during writing. The participants were 30 advanced Chinese L2 users of English, who wrote an argumentative essay. While composing, participants’ keystrokes and eye-gaze movements were recorded to capture their pausing, revision, and eye-gaze behaviors. The working memory battery included tests of phonological and visual short-term memory and executive functions. We divided the writing process into five equal periods. The results revealed that participants’ pausing and revision patterns were consistent with previous findings that planning, linguistic encoding, and monitoring processes dominate the initial, middle, and later composing periods, respectively. Various working memory components had differential effects on pausing depending on period, largely reflecting the predictions of Kellogg’s (1996, 2001) model. However, we identified no differences in the temporal distribution of revision behaviors contingent on working memory.

This study examined how linguistic complexity features contribute to second language (L2) processing effort by analyzing the Dutch English-L2 learners’ eye movements from GECO and MECO, two eye-tracking corpora. Processing effort was operationalized as reading rate, mean fixation duration, regression rate, skipping rate, and mean saccade amplitude. In Study 1, the lexical, syntactic, and discoursal indices in 272 snippets of a novel in GECO were regressed against these eye-movement measures. The results showed that the one-component partial least square regression (PLS-R) models could explain 11%–37% of the variance in these eye-movement measures and outperformed eight readability formulas (six traditional and two recent cognitively inspired formulas based on the readers’ perception on text difficulty) in predicting L2 processing effort. In Study 2, the eye-tracking data from MECO were used to evaluate whether the findings from Study 1 could be applied more broadly. The results revealed that although the predictability of these PLS-R components decreased, they still performed better than the readability formulas. These findings suggest that the linguistic indices identified can be used to predict L2 text processing effort and provide useful implications for developing systems to assess text difficulty for L2 learners.

This Introduction to the special issue first elaborates on the rationale for advocating the inclusion of L2 writing in SLA individual differences (IDs) research and subsequently provides an overview of empirical work on IDs in the domain of writing, with a focus on cognitive IDs and specifically working memory. Against this background, we synthesize the focus, structure, and contents of the special issue. We finish with substantive and methodological suggestions for moving forward in research agendas on IDs and L2 writing.

A number of studies of second language (L2) sentence processing have investigated whether ambiguity resolution biases in the native language (L1) transfer to superficially similar cognate structures in the L2. When transfer effects are found in such cases, it is difficult to determine whether they reflect surface parallels between the languages or the operation of more abstract processing mechanisms. Wh-questions in English and Japanese present a valuable test case for investigating the relation between L1 and L2 sentence processing. Native speakers (NSs) of English and Japanese both show strong locality biases in processing wh-questions, but these locality biases are realized in rather different ways in the two languages, due to differences in word order and scope marking. Results from a sentence generation study with NSs of Japanese and advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Japanese show that the L2 learners show a strongly nativelike locality bias in the resolution of scope ambiguities for in situ wh-phrases, despite the fact that the closest analogue of such an interpretation is impossible in English. This indicates that L2 learners are guided by abstract processing mechanisms and not just by superficial transfer from the L1.This research was supported in part by grants to Colin Phillips from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0196004) and the Human Frontier Science Program (RGY-0134). We are also grateful to Ellen Lau, Kaori Ozawa, Rozz Thornton, and Masaya Yoshida for valuable discussions of the study, to Deborah Eastman, Gretchen Jones, Eiko Miura, Yoshiko Mori, and Lindsay Yotsukura for assistance with recruiting the Japanese learners, and to John Matthews for assistance with the testing of the Japanese NS group.

This study investigates the extent to which (a) Spanish heritage (HL) and second language (L2) writers’ linguistic complexity differs across register contexts and (b) Spanish proficiency and writing motivational beliefs differentially affect HL and L2 writers’ performance. Participants were 58 HL and 54 L2 Spanish learners who completed two persuasive writing tasks—the Email to Friend and Letter to Dean tasks—designed to be topically similar while eliciting different registers. Proficiency measures included an elicited imitation task (EIT) and a cloze test. Mixed-effects models indicated that both HL and L2 writers evidenced greater lexico-syntactic complexity in the Letter to Dean task; nonetheless, HL writers demonstrated more robust cross-register distinctions in syntactic complexity. The EIT and cloze test positively predicted syntactic and lexical complexity, respectively, although differential patterns were also observed by group. Intrinsic/interest and cognitive/linguistic value beliefs about Spanish writing emerged as positive and negative predictors of linguistic complexity, respectively.

This study presents research on the affective reactions of native French speakers to 15 types of grammatical error made by an American speaking French. The native French judges are divided into three age groups, C.E.S. students, lycée students, and adults, and an error hierarchy is provided for each. Results show a continuum by age as to how these judges react to gender errors, that is errors of non-agreement with definite articles and adjectives with nouns. The younger, C.E.S. students are most sensitive to gender errors, lycée students slightly less sensitive, and adults the least irritated of the three, to the point that, for the adults, the five gender errors are rated as the five least serious errors in the error hierarchy. Possible explanations for this difference in error sensitivity are offered, with special attention to the possible influence of socioeconomic status. These results are compared to findings in English, French, German, and Spanish, with particular focus on results obtained in German by Politzer (1978) and Delisle (1982).