This study investigated sentence-processing strategies adopted by advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of English in the context of an English structure with which NNSs reportedly have an acquisition difficulty (e.g., Swan & Smith, 2001)—namely, modal perfect (MP). Participants read MP sentences such as He could have worked at the shoe factory and closely related analogous sentences (e.g., He could have work at the shoe factory), and reading times and errors were measured in an online grammaticality-judgment task. It was hypothesized that NSs would have a processing preference for MP sentences compared to the analogues, reflecting the primacy of syntactic information in NS processing and a preference for late closure, whereas NNSs would show no such preference because they rely less on syntactic information when processing sentences. The results revealed, however, that both NSs and NNSs read MP sentences more quickly and with fewer errors than the closely related analogues, consistent with a processing preference for MP sentences. Both groups were also influenced by word-category frequency information, which moderated, but did not fundamentally alter, their syntactic preference for MP. The significance of these findings is discussed in terms of models of second-language sentence processing and NNSs’ reported MP acquisition difficulty.

This article provides a comprehensive synthesis of research on language attrition to date, with a view to establishing a theoretically sound basis for future research in the domain of second language (L2) attrition. We identify the variables that must be tracked in populations who experience language loss, and we develop a general model for the assessment of the processes involved. This critical review suggests that future research in this domain should establish baselines for attainment against which to measure attrition, and that learners must be compared to themselves in longitudinal designs that involve periodic assessment of both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. In the proposed model, populations are defined as sets of variables, which are subject to change following shifts in discrete time periods in the general process of acquisition and attrition. A working model is elaborated for the assessment of L2 attrition and retention, which, we hope, might encourage additional work in this area.

Although the emergence of creoles presupposes naturalistic SLA, current SLA scholarship does not shed much light on the development of creoles with regard to the population-internal mechanisms that produce normalization and autonomization from the creoles’ lexifiers. This is largely due to the fact that research on SLA is focused on individuals rather than on communities of speakers producing their own separate norms, whereas genetic creolistics deals precisely with this particular aspect of language change and speciation. It is not enough to prove that transfer from the first to the second language is possible and can evolve into substrate influence on the emergent vernaculars—transfer is not ineluctable and varies from one learner to another. Additionally, how and why particular features of some speakers spread to a whole population (or to parts thereof), whereas others do not, must be accounted for. Consistent with colonial socioeconomic history, the gradual emergence of creoles suggests a complex evolution that cannot be accounted for with simplistic invocations of either interlanguage or relexification. This article presents limitations in the cross-pollination that has been expected from genetic creolistics and research on SLA.

This study contributes to a central debate within contemporary generative second language (L2) theorizing: the extent to which adult learners are (un)able to acquire new functional features that result in a L2 grammar that is mentally structured like the native target (see White, 2003). The adult acquisition of L2 nominal phi-features is explored, with focus on the syntactic and semantic reflexes in the related domain of adjective placement in two experimental groups: English-speaking intermediate (n = 21) and advanced (n = 24) learners of Spanish, as compared to a native-speaker control group (n = 15). Results show that, on some of the tasks, the intermediate L2 learners appear to have acquired the syntactic properties of the Spanish determiner phrase but, on other tasks, to show some delay with the semantic reflexes of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Crucially, however, our data demonstrate full convergence by all advanced learners and thus provide evidence in contra the predictions of representational deficit accounts (e.g., Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; Hawkins & Hattori, 2006).

This study reports on the impact of 11 West European first languages on the acquisition of Dutch. Using data from nearly 6,000 second-language learners, it was found that the mother tongue had a rather large impact on two language skills—namely, oral and written proficiency—as measured by the scores received by these learners on the State Examination of Dutch as a Second Language. Multilevel analyses showed that the effect of the mother tongue can adequately be modeled by means of the cognate linguistic distance measure, adopted from McMahon and McMahon (2005). The explanative power of the genetic linguistic distance measure (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994), on the other hand, was rather poor. Additionally, learner characteristics (age of arrival, length of residence, hours studying Dutch, education, and gender) and context characteristics (quality of schooling in the country of origin and multilingual country of origin) explained part of the variation in Dutch speaking and writing skills.

For more than a decade now, a great deal of research has been done on the topic of written corrective feedback (CF) in SLA and second language (L2) writing. Nonetheless, what those research efforts really have shown as well as the possible implications for practice remain in dispute. Although L2 writing and SLA researchers often examine similar phenomena in similar ways, they do not necessarily ask the same questions. SLA-focused researchers investigate whether written CF facilitates the acquisition of particular linguistic features. In contrast, L2 writing researchers generally emphasize the question of whether written CF helps student writers improve the overall effectiveness of their texts. Understanding these differences in starting points is important because it provides a possible explanation for the conflicting methodologies and conclusions of various reviews on this topic (e.g., Ferris, 2003, 2004; Truscott, 1996, 2007). This article briefly traces the history of these two parallel lines of research on written CF and notes both contrasts and convergences. It then moves to a focused discussion of the possible implications and applications of this body of work for the L2 language and writing classroom and for future research efforts.

The current study investigates the limited attainment of adult language acquisition in terms of an associative learning phenomenon whereby earlier learned cues attentionally block those that are experienced later. Short- and long-term blocking are demonstrated in experimental investigations of learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in a small set of Latin phrases. In Experiment 1, previous experience with adverbial cues blocks the acquisition of verbal tense morphology, and, in contrast, early experience with tense blocks later learning of adverbs. Experiment 2 demonstrates long-term transfer effects: Native speakers of Chinese languages, which do not exhibit verb tense morphology, fail to acquire inflectional cues when adverbial and verbal cues are equally available.

This article presents new evidence from offline and online processing of garden-path sentences that are ambiguous between reduced relative clause resolution and main verb resolution. The participants of this study are intermediate and advanced German learners of English who have learned the language in a nonimmersed context. The results show that for second language (L2) learners, there is a dissociation between parsing mechanisms and grammatical knowledge: The learners successfully process the structures in question offline, but the online self-paced reading task shows different patterns for the L2 learners and the native-speaker control group. The results are discussed with regard to shallow processing in L2 learners (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). Because the structures in question differ in English and German, first language (L1) influence is also discussed as an explanation for the findings. The comparison of the three participant groups’ results points to a gradual rather than a fundamental difference between L1 and L2 processing.

The identification of stressed syllables by adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners was examined for evidence of influence of an allophonic alternation driven by word position and stress. The Spanish voiced stop-approximant alternation, whereby stops occur in stressed-syllable and word onsets, was utilized. If L2 learners track the distribution of this alternation, they should tend to link stops to stressed syllables in word-onset position and approximants to unstressed, word-medial position. Low- and high-intermediate-level first-language English learners of Spanish as well as native Spanish and monolingual English speakers listened to a series of nonce words and determined which of the two consonant-vowel (CV) syllables they perceived as stressed. In Experiment 1, onset allophone and vowel stress were crossed. In Experiment 2, the onset allophone alternated and a vowel unmarked for prominence was used. The results show that the monolingual English and low-intermediate groups were more likely to perceive syllables with stressed vowels as stressed, regardless of the allophone onset. In contrast, listeners with greater Spanish proficiency performed similarly to native Spanish speakers and were more likely to perceive stress on syllables with stop onsets, a pattern that follows the distributional information of Spanish. This finding suggests that learning the interplay between allophonic distributions and their conditioning factors is possible with experience and that knowledge of this relationship plays a role in the acquisition of L2 allophones.

This article examines whether there is any difference between the effect of oral and written corrective feedback (CF) on learners’ accurate use of English articles. To this end, the current research presents the results of a quasi-experimental study with a pretest, immediate-posttest, delayed-posttest design, using 12 intact intermediate English-as-a-second-language classes with adult learners of various first language backgrounds. Five groups were formed: oral recasts (n = 26), oral metalinguistic (n = 26), written direct correction (n = 31), written direct metalinguistic (n = 32), and control (n = 28). All four experimental groups completed two 30-min communicative narrative tasks. For the oral CF groups, students were asked to retell a story during which CF was provided. For the written CF groups, students were first asked to rewrite a story and then given CF. The acquisition of English articles was measured by means of a speeded dictation test, a written narrative test, and an error correction test. One-way ANOVAs with post hoc comparisons indicated that all CF groups, except for oral recasts, significantly outperformed the control group in the immediate and delayed posttests. These findings show that, whereas implicit oral recasts that involve article errors were not facilitative to learning, the other CF types were effective in helping learners improve the grammatical accuracy of English articles irrespective of language analytic ability. Overall, these results suggest that the degree of explicitness of both oral and written CF—rather than the medium in which the CF is provided—is the key factor that influences CF effectiveness.

This article adds to the growing body of research focused on second-language (L2) variation and constitutes the first large-scale study of the production of potentially variable grammatical structures in Spanish by English-speaking learners. The overarching goal of the project is to assess the range of forms used and the degree to which native and L2 speakers of Spanish differ in several independently defined syntactic or discourse-based contexts. The contexts examined in the current study have been the object of sociolinguistic research in monolingual environments and include the following: copula contrast, mood distinction, past-time reference, future-time reference, and subject expression. Interview data from 16 English-speaking learners and 16 native speakers of Spanish from a variety of countries, all of whom are part of a single speech community in the United States, are examined. The analysis focuses on the range of forms used in each of the contexts investigated and the frequency with which these forms appear. A possible relation of individual characteristics, such as country of origin, years of language study, and time spent abroad, to this frequency of use is also considered.

This study tested the predictions of the revised hierarchical (RHM) and morphological decomposition (MDM) models with Arabic-English bilinguals. The RHM (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) predicts that the amount of activation of first language translation equivalents is negatively correlated with second language (L2) proficiency. The MDM (Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997) claims that in nonconcatenative languages, including Arabic, activation spreads by morphological identity rather than orthographic similarity. To test these two models, native speakers of Arabic at two levels of English L2 proficiency completed a translation recognition task. In the critical conditions, the Arabic word was not the correct translation of the English word (shoulder-katif) but was orthographically related (shoulder-kahf “cave”), morphologically related but semantically opaque (shoulder-takaatuf “unity”), or semantically related (shoulder-raqaba “neck”). Results show more morphological- than orthographic-form interference for all participants, in line with the MDM. Contrary to the RHM, however, both proficiency groups experienced interference in the semantic condition as well as in the form conditions.

Most studies that have investigated the effects of instruction on the SLA of specific grammatical features have focused on intentional learning. This study investigated incidental acquisition by comparing the relative effects of two types of instruction—comprehension-based instruction (CBI) and production-based instruction (PBI)—on young Japanese learners’ incidental acquisition of English plural –s. Results showed that both the CBI and PBI groups performed significantly better than the control group on both the comprehension and production tests. There were no statistically significant differences between the two experimental groups. However, a comparison of those learners in the two groups who were complete beginners indicated an advantage for the CBI instruction. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interactions in one CBI and one PBI class showed that the students who received both kinds of instruction had ample exposure to plural –s nouns but that the nature of the corrective feedback they received differed. Whereas the feedback that the students in the CBI group received on their comprehension errors enabled them to distinguish the meanings of plural and singular nouns, the feedback that the students in the PBI group received on their production errors—in the form of recasts—did not result in the repair of errors.

Conducted in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in China, this quasi-experimental study compared the effects of three different corrective feedback treatments on 72 Chinese learners’ use of regular and irregular English past tense. Three classes were randomly assigned to a prompt group, a recast group, or a control group and then participated in form-focused production activities that elicited the target forms. In the two feedback groups, teachers consistently provided one type of feedback (i.e., either recasts or prompts) in response to learners’ errors during the activities, whereas in the control group, the teacher provided feedback only on content. Pretests, immediate posttests, and delayed posttests administered 2 weeks after the treatment assessed participants’ acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms in both oral and written production. Comparisons of group means across testing sessions using a repeated-measures ANOVA consistently revealed large effects for time. Post hoc within-group analyses of the eight immediate- and delayed-posttest measures revealed significant gains by the prompt group on all eight measures, the recast group on four, and the control group on three. The effects of prompts were larger than those of recasts for increasing accuracy in the use of regular past tense forms, whereas prompts and recasts had similar effects on improving accuracy in the use of irregular past tense forms.

The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in second or foreign language development, Williams (2005) offered empirical evidence that learning without awareness appears to be feasible. At the same time, it is also noted that Leow’s and Williams’s (2005) research designs measured unawareness at different stages (online encoding and offline retrieval, respectively) of the acquisitional process. The present study revisited and extended Williams’s (2005) study by using a hybrid design to gather concurrent data at the stage of encoding and during the testing phase as well as nonconcurrent data after the experimental exposure. Some methodological changes were also implemented to probe deeper into learners’ thought processes. The quantitative analyses performed on the data of 34 carefully screened participants revealed that, at the encoding stage, unaware learners do not appear capable of selecting or producing the correct determiner-noun combination when required to do so from options that include both animacy and distance information. The qualitative data underscore the importance of not only situating the measurement of the construct (un)awareness from different stages—that is, both online and offline—but also triangulating data from several sources in any report on its role in learning. Plausible explanations for the differences in findings are discussed.

To investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of oral corrective feedback (CF) on target language development, we conducted a meta-analysis that focused exclusively on 15 classroom-based studies (N = 827). The analysis was designed to investigate whether CF was effective in classroom settings and, if so, whether its effectiveness varied according to (a) types of CF, (b) types and timing of outcome measures, (c) instructional setting (second vs. foreign language classroom), (d) treatment length, and (e) learners’ age. Results revealed that CF had significant and durable effects on target language development. The effects were larger for prompts than recasts and most apparent in measures that elicit free constructed responses. Whereas instructional setting was not identified as a contributing factor to CF effectiveness, effects of long treatments were larger than those of short-to-medium treatments but not distinguishable from those of brief treatments. A simple regression analysis revealed effects for age, with younger learners benefiting from CF more than older learners.