The present study investigated the effects of exposure to Chinese orthography on learning phonological forms of new words in learners of Chinese as a second language. A total of 30 adult learners of Chinese studied spoken label and picture associations presented either with phonologically accurate characters, characters with partial phonological information, or no orthography. Half the phonologically accurate or partially accurate characters were semantically transparent or opaque. Spoken labels were recalled without orthography presence. Results showed that exposure to phonologically accurate and semantically transparent characters during learning did not enhance the recall of the spoken labels compared to no orthography. But exposure to characters with partial phonological information and semantically opaque characters significantly hindered vocabulary learning. The implications for Chinese as a second language vocabulary acquisition and instruction are discussed.

The present study examined the relative effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for L2 viewing comprehension, compared to other subtitling types. Learners’ allocation of attention to the image and subtitles/captions in different viewing conditions, as well as the relationship between attention and comprehension, were also investigated. A total of 112 Chinese learners of English watched an English documentary clip in one of four conditions (bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, no subtitles) while their eye movements were recorded. The results revealed that bilingual subtitles were as beneficial as L1 subtitles for comprehension, which both outscored captions and no subtitles. Participants using bilingual subtitles spent significantly more time processing L1 than L2 lines. L1 lines in bilingual subtitles were processed significantly longer than in L1 subtitles, but L2 lines were processed significantly shorter than in captions. No significant relationship was found between the processing time and comprehension for either the L1 or L2 lines of bilingual subtitles.

DEVELOPING LITERACY IN SECOND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS: REPORT OF THE NATIONAL LITERACY PANEL ON LANGUAGE-MINORITY CHILDREN AND YOUTH.Diane August and Timothy Shanahan (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. vii + 669. $65.00 paper.

This is the outcome of work by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. The panel included experts from the United States and Canada selected by the Institute of Education Sciences. The topics addressed include second language (L2) development, cognitive development, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and methodology. Concerned with how best to improve literacy achievement for language-minority students, the collection is a synthesis of more than 200 systematically selected research reports on the development of literacy for language-minority students. The panel (with August as principal investigator and Shanahan as Chair) undertook a comprehensive review of studies on language-minority students based mainly in the United States but also incorporated studies from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, and Israel.

This study assessed knowledge of numerically quantified English sentences in two learner populations—second language (L2) learners and deaf learners—whose acquisition of English occurs under conditions of restricted access to the target language input. Under the experimental test conditions, interlanguage parallels were predicted to arise from acquisitional pressures imposed by derivational economy on universal grammar (UG)–guided semantic interpretation. The results of a task in which participants matched sentences to multiple discourse depictions confirmed the predicted parallels. However, in matching underinformative sentences to depicted contexts, the L2 and deaf learner groups overactivated discourse-pragmatic knowledge. The restriction of indefinite noun phrases to singleton indefinites and the cancellation of scalar implicatures rendered sentences more informative in underinformative contexts, producing incorrect—although principled—interpretations. These results inform English acquisition at the interface of semantics and discourse pragmatics and provide further support that economy pressures yield L2 learner and deaf learner interlanguage parallels as observed, for instance, in learners’ interpretative knowledge of universally quantified English sentences.

The present study investigates how L2 learners adapt their production preferences following immediate and cumulative experience with a syntactic structure when an L2 structure differs from an L1 structure in terms of verb subcategorization frame and argument structure. Korean learners of English described causative events in English in a picture-matching game. The meaning of a causative sentence in English (e.g., Jen had her computer fixed) is expressed with an active transitive sentence in Korean (e.g., Jen-NOM computer-ACC fixed). The results demonstrated that both immediate and cumulative experience with a causative structure increased the likelihood of producing grammatical causative descriptions (e.g., Jen had her computer fixed), while decreasing the production of ungrammatical active transitive descriptions (e.g., Jen fixed her computer). The findings provide novel evidence that an implicit learning mechanism is involved in L2 learners’ processing and learning of an L2 structure that is different from L1.

Monolingual English speakers and Chinese–English bilinguals were compared on their lexical decision performance in a masked priming experiment where the prime and target ended in the same embedded word. All primes were nonwords where the letters in addition to the embedded word did not form a morpheme (e.g., the sab of sabagree or the ple of plerough). The targets were of two types. In one condition they were prefixed words (as in sabagree–DISAGREE) and in the other they were nonprefixed words (as in plerough–THOROUGH). With an unrelated prime as the baseline, the native speakers showed priming for the prefixed words but not the nonprefixed words, whereas the nonnative speakers showed priming for both types of word. It was concluded from these results that nonnative speakers focus more on the individual letters of a complex word than do native speakers when reading, and the specific processing mechanisms that might underlie this are discussed.

LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND THE BRAIN: INSIGHTS FROM SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH. Karen Emmorey. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. xvii + 383. $99.95 cloth, $49.95 paper.

In the preface, Emmorey states her goal for this book: to illustrate what can be learned about human language, cognition, and the brain by studying signed languages and the deaf people who use them. She clearly achieves that goal in this excellent volume. Her scholarship is impeccable, something we have come to expect from this author. First of all, the organization of the book is impressive. Each chapter explicitly presents specific goals and then proceeds through those goals in an organized and clear style. The conclusion of each chapter includes suggested readings with a brief explanation of how these suggestions support the chapter. Second, this volume includes research on a variety of signed languages—Nicaraguan, Australian, Danish, and Irish, to name a few—and provides a truly comprehensive approach to the topic.

This study addresses the effects of the timing of explicit instruction within the three phases of a task cycle (pretask, task, posttask) while considering learner’s previous knowledge. Eight intact groups (N = 165) of French L2 university-level students (4 B1- and 4 B2-level groups) completed two tasks. Groups were formed according to previous knowledge. Three groups received explicit instruction on the French subjunctive during the pretask, task, or posttask phase of each task. The control groups completed the task without prior instruction. Participants completed an elicited imitation test and a grammaticality judgment test as pretests, immediate posttests, and delayed posttests. Results showed that explicit instruction embedded in a task facilitates the development of explicit and implicit knowledge and that the efficacy of instruction is not significantly influenced by the timing at which it is provided or by the learners’ level of previous knowledge.

This study examined the role of discourse organization in second language (L2) comprehensibility ratings. Twelve English for Academic Purposes teachers listened to 60 L2 speech samples elicited through a TOEFL–type integrated speaking task, evaluating each sample for comprehensibility and coherence (perceived interconnectedness of ideas). The samples were analyzed for the occurrence of discourse features at micro and macro levels. Results revealed a strong association between coherence and comprehensibility (r = .70). Whereas L2 speakers’ use of additive connectives (e.g., and) uniquely predicted comprehensibility, ordering of ideas and source–speech similarity in speakers’ performances predicted coherence. Lexical overlaps predicted both constructs. Findings underscore the importance of coherence to comprehensible academic L2 speech demonstrating that the two constructs include partially overlapping yet distinct characteristics.

The following paper is an account of empirical research in lexical acquisition, an ongoing study whose preliminary findings were reported at the Neuchâtel colloquium May 1976 (Levenston and Blum 1977). A discussion of the research methodology has also been published (Levenston and Blum 1978), as well as an attempt to link this work with studies of lexical simplification in other linguistic contexts (Blum and Levenston 1977). Before discussing in detail the current findings, it seems appropriate to summarize briefly the preceding research, of which they form an integral part.

From the point of view of linguists interested in pidginization, creolization, or other language contact phenomena, the continued presence of large numbers of southern European and North African foreign workers (called Gastaibeitei in Germany) and their families in northern European countries presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and subsequent stages of foreign language acquisition and development. Of particular interest is the fact that many of the languages involved here (Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) are typologically and genetically distinct; thus the situation is ideal for the study of common features of language development. If a Creole were to develop here, it would provide extremely valuable evidence for or against proposed universals.

Research into general linguistic and cognitive processes in humans has been aided by studies of analogous processes in animals. Studies on how birds develop their species-specific song have been of particular interest to researchers seeking to identify critical variables and universels in first language acquisition in humans. Because of recent studies on exceptional song acquisition, that is, time-independent. learning of second dialects or song by birds generally thought to acquire a single song during a limited sensitive period, we suggest that there also exist significant parallels between human second language acquisition and avian bilingualism. The purpose of this paper is to highlight these parallels and to demonstrate that such interspecies comparisons may provide new insights into the processes of second language acquisition.

Applied linguistics is very much a problem-oriented discipline and therefore necessarily an integrative discipline. I know that it is difficult to define what a ‘problem’ is; there are nevertheless important differences between problem-oriented disciplines and theory-based disciplines, like psychology and linguistics, to take a couple of relevant examples. Activities, including research, carried out in the name of applied linguistics should throw light on the processes and conditions and phenomena of language acquisition, language learning or language use, with the aim of contributing to the solution of the difficulties and practical problems that arise. And the problems that people face in connection with language learning or language use are messy, that is to say, like all real life situations they are not analysable in term of only one basic discipline. The chief requirement on research within such basic disciplines is that it should throw light on theoretical models and issues, and to do that the researcher abstracts from the experential world only those special aspects which are interesting to him. People who work in applied disciplines have to deal with complex real life situations as they are, as they are seen to be by the participants in those situations, and have to draw on whatever background disciplines that are relevant and available. (That nearly always means that more than one researcher has to be involved.)