Incidental focus on form overtly draws learners' attention to linguistic items as they arise spontaneously—without prior planning—in meaning-focused interaction. This study examined the effectiveness of incidental focus on form in promoting second language (L2) learning. Seventeen hours of naturally occurring, meaning-focused L2 lessons were observed in 12 different classes of young adults in a private language school in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 491 focus-on-form episodes (FFEs) were identified and used as a basis for individualized test items in which participants who participated in specific FFEs were asked to recall the linguistic information provided in them. The results revealed that learners were able to recall the targeted linguistic information correctly or partially correctly nearly 60% of the time 1 day after the FFE, and 50% of the time 2 weeks later. Furthermore, successful uptake in a FFE was found to be a significant predictor of correct test scores. These results suggest that incidental focus on form might be beneficial to learners, particularly if they incorporate the targeted linguistic items into their own production.This research was supported, in part, by a scholarship from the Foundation for Science, Research, and Technology, New Zealand. The author would like to thank the teachers and participants who kindly gave of their time to participate in this study. The author would also like to thank Rod Ellis, Catherine Elder, Helen Basturkmen, Rosemary Erlam, Jenefer Philp, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable input and feedback on this study. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2002 (Salt Lake City, UT) and at AILA 2002 (Singapore).

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of phonologically similar words were investigated for their effect on the placement of stress in English nonwords. Both bilingual groups—like the native English controls—showed extension of stress patterns from phonologically similar real words. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers, and late bilinguals showed more reduced effects. Unlike previous work with Spanish-English bilinguals, Korean-English bilinguals demonstrated a nonnativelike effect of lexical class, most pronounced in the late bilinguals. This difference might be due to Koreans' low sensitivity to word-level statistical distributions because of early exposure to a phrase-level prosodic system.This research was supported by a grant (DC05132) from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). Thanks are extended to J. J. Clark for her help in administering the experiments and to Kyoung-Ho Kang for help locating participants. I would also like to thank the four anonymous SSLA reviewers, Jonathan Loftin, and Lisa Redford for valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

This paper investigates the effects of input and interaction as separate entities and in combination. We further investigate these effects as a function of different language areas. One hundred two learners of L2 Spanish were provided with input on (a) Spanish gender agreement (noun + adjective), (b) estar + location, and (c) seven vocabulary items. There were four conditions: (a) material focused solely on input, (b) material focused solely on interaction, (c) input-focused material followed by interaction, and (d) interaction-focused material followed by input. A control group completed a pretest and posttest. In general, greatest improvement from pretest to posttest for all conditions was noted for vocabulary. Learners exposed to input and interaction in combination showed greater improvement than those in conditions with only input or only interaction. In the two grammatical areas (gender agreement and estar + location), learners who received interaction followed by input showed greatest improvement. We consider issues such as complexity and abstractness to account for the findings of differential effects on language areas.Funding for this project was provided by a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the Center for Language Education and Research at Michigan State University (P229A990012 and P229A020001). We would like to thank George Sirbu and Pingping Ni for help with the statistics of this study. We are also grateful to the anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. All errors remain our own.

There are good theoretical and educational reasons to place matters of implicit and explicit learning high on the agenda for SLA research. As for theoretical motivations, perhaps the most central issue in SLA theory construction in need of explanation is the differential success in one's first language (L1) and in one's second language (L2). Although acquisition of an L1 results in full mastery of the language (provided that children are exposed to sufficient quantities of input and do not suffer from mental disabilities), learners of an L2—even after many years of L2 exposure—differ widely in level of attainment. How can we explain universal success in the case of L1 acquisition and differential success in the case of L2 acquisition? Among the many explanations that have been proposed, including brain maturation and brain adaptation processes (critical period), access to Universal Grammar, L1 interference, and sociopsychological factors (see Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003, for a review), one finds explanations that involve the notions of implicit and explicit learning. Scholars working in different disciplines, in different theoretical schools, and sometimes using different terminology have argued that L1 acquisition (or at least the acquisition of L1 grammar) relies principally on processes of what we might now call implicit learning, whereas the acquisition of an L2 often relies on both implicit and explicit learning (Bley-Vroman, 1991; DeKeyser, 2003; N. Ellis, this issue; R. Ellis, 2004; Krashen, 1981; Reber & Allen, 2000).I am grateful to Rod Ellis for his thoughtful comments on previous versions of this text.

Stable nonnative varieties of English acquired and used in the absence of native English input can diverge systematically from native varieties over time (Cheshire, 1991; Kachru, 1983; Platt, Weber, & Ho, 1984). Focusing on Indian English article use, this study asks the following question: If divergence is indeed occurring, do new features derive primarily from first language (L1) transfer or from universal principles? Natural conversational speech is assessed in relation to four hypotheses relating to L1 transfer and language universals, and a multivariate regression analysis evaluates the relative strength of each factor. The new article system is not found to be identical to the L1 article system. Although L1 transfer appears to be operative when an overt form (the specific indefinite article) exists in the L1, when a gap occurs in the L1 (no definite article), speakers do not completely omit the definite article in their second language English. Using Prince's (1981) taxonomy of assumed familiarity, it is shown that the absence of a L1 model for definite articles permits the intervention of universally available discourse knowledge, such that speakers apply an economical, disambiguating principle to the use of overt articles, reserving them mainly for new (less given or inferable) information and omitting them in more redundant contexts.I am indebted to John Rickford, Elizabeth Traugott, Arnold Zwicky, Ishtla Singh, and the SSLA editors and anonymous reviewers for much helpful feedback. I also received valuable comments from audiences at the LSA, Atlanta (January 2003) and at UC Davis and UC San Diego (February 2003).

This study examined the effects of acoustic variability on second language vocabulary learning. English native speakers learned new words in Spanish. Exposure frequency to the words was constant. Dependent measures were accuracy and latency of picture-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English recall. Experiment 1 compared presentation formats of neutral (conversational) voice only, three voice types, and six voice types. No significant differences emerged. Experiment 2 compared presentation formats of one speaker, three speakers, and six speakers. Vocabulary learning was superior in the higher-variability conditions. Experiment 3 partially replicated Experiment 1 while rotating voice types across subjects in moderate and no-variability conditions. Vocabulary learning was superior in the higher variability conditions. These results are consistent with an exemplar-based theory of initial lexical learning and representation.Portions of these data were presented at the 143rd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Cancun, Mexico and at the Fourth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon in Windsor, Canada. The authors would like to thank Paola Rijos for help in data collection and scoring and the anonymous SSLA reviewers.

A problem facing investigations of implicit and explicit learning is the lack of valid measures of second language implicit and explicit knowledge. This paper attempts to establish operational definitions of these two constructs and reports a psychometric study of a battery of tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them. These tests were (a) an oral imitation test involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, (b) an oral narration test, (c) a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT), (d) an untimed GJT with the same content, and (e) a metalinguistic knowledge test. Tests (a), (b), and (c) were designed as measures of implicit knowledge, and tests (d) and (e) were designed as measures of explicit knowledge. All of the tests examined 17 English grammatical structures. A principal component factor analysis produced two clear factors. This analysis showed that the scores from tests (a), (b), and (c) loaded on Factor 1, whereas the scores from ungrammatical sentences in test (d) and total scores from test (e) loaded on Factor 2. These two factors are interpreted as corresponding to implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. A number of secondary analyses to support this interpretation of the construct validity of the tests are also reported.This research was funded by a Marsden Fund grant awarded by the Royal Society of Arts of New Zealand to Rod Ellis and Cathie Elder. Other researchers who contributed to the research are Shawn Loewen, Rosemary Erlam, Satomi Mizutani, and Shuhei Hidaka.The author wishes to thank Nick Ellis, Jim Lantolf, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers. Their constructive comments have helped me to present the theoretical background of the study more convincingly and to remove errors from the results and refine my interpretations of them.

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association, grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways. The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive tasks.I wish to acknowledge the generous input of the following people in the evolution of this paper: Paul Nation, Jonathan Newton, and Jim Dickie from Victoria University of Wellington, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers, for their helpful comments.

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their prepublication manuscript available to us.

The purpose of the present study was to determine what features associated with the macrolevel of lexical competence vary as a function of an increase in second language (L2) proficiency. The macrolevel of participants' word knowledge was described with respect to six variables that are commonly associated with three proposed macrolevel dimensions, namely quantity, quality, and metacognitive awareness. Sixty-four participants (native speakers of English, L2 advanced learners, and intermediate learners of English) self-rated their familiarity with 73 lexical items and were asked to generate word associations to the words they identified in a verifiable way as known. The data analyses showed that some measures, such as vocabulary size, word frequency effects, number of associations, and within-group consistency of participants' associative domain, are more sensitive to L2 learners' increasing proficiency than others (e.g., nativelike commonality of associations). We thus conclude that some aspects, such as quality and quantity of L2 lexical competence, develop as the proficiency of the L2 learners increases, whereas others, such as learners' metacognitive awareness, are not proficiency dependent. We also suggest that the measures that were identified as sensitive to capturing the overall state of L2 learners' vocabularies would also be reliable indexes of learners' proficiency development.

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the contributions of explicit and implicit processes during second language (L2) sentence comprehension. We used a L2 grammaticality judgment task (GJT) to test 20 native English speakers enrolled in the first four semesters of Spanish while recording both accuracy and ERP data. Because end-of-sentence grammaticality judgments are open to conscious inspection, we reasoned that they can be influenced by strategic processes that reflect on formal rules and therefore reflect primarily offline explicit processing. On the other hand, because ERPs are a direct reflection of online processing, they reflect automatic, nonreflective, implicit responses to stimuli (Osterhout, Bersick, & McLaughlin, 1997; Rugg et al., 1998; Tachibana et al., 1999).

We used a version of the GJT adapted for the ERP environment. The experimental sentences varied the form of three different syntactic constructions: (a) tense-marking, which is formed similarly in the first language (L1) and the L2; (b) determiner number agreement, which is formed differently in the L1 and the L2; and (c) determiner gender agreement, which is unique to the L2. We examined ERP responses during a time period between 500 and 900 ms following the onset of the critical (violation or matched control) word in the sentence because extensive past research has shown that grammatical violations elicit a positive-going deflection in the ERP waveform during this period (e.g., the “P600”; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992).

We found that learners were sensitive (i.e., showed different brain responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences) to violations in L2 for constructions that are formed similarly in the L1 and the L2, but were not sensitive to violations for constructions that differ in the L1 and the L2. Critically, a robust grammaticality effect was found in the ERP data for the construction that was unique to the L2, suggesting that the learners were implicitly sensitive to these violations. Judgment accuracy was near chance for all constructions. These findings suggest that learners are able to implicitly process some aspects of L2 syntax even in early stages of learning but that this knowledge depends on the similarity between the L1 and the L2. Furthermore, there is a divergence between explicit and implicit measures of L2 learning, which might be due to the behavioral task demands (e.g., McLaughlin, Osterhout, & Kim, 2004). We conclude that comparing ERP and behavioral data could provide a sensitive method for measuring implicit processing.This research was supported by a National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award (NIH HD42948-01) awarded to Natasha Tokowicz and a National Institutes of Health Institutional National Research Service Award (T32 MH19102) awarded to Brian MacWhinney. We thank Beatrice DeAngelis, Dayne Grove, Kwan Hansongkitpong, Katie Keil, Lee Osterhout, Chuck Perfetti, Kelley Sacco, Alex Waid, and Eddie Wlotko for their assistance with this project. We gratefully acknowledge the comments of Rod Ellis, Jan Hulstijn, Albert Valdman, and the two anonymous SSLA reviewers on earlier versions of this manuscript. A portion of these results was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2002, November).

The present study addresses the reactivity of two types of verbal protocols in SLA research. It expands on the work of Leow and Morgan-Short (2004), who found nonmetalinguistic verbalization during a second-language reading task to be nonreactive for beginning learners' text comprehension, intake, and production of the targeted morphological form. The present study investigated the reactivity of both metalinguistic and nonmetalinguistic protocols, using a syntactic structure and advanced language learners of Spanish. Results indicated that neither type of verbalization significantly affected text comprehension or written production of old or new exemplars of the targeted structure when compared to a control group, although metalinguistic verbalization appeared to cause a significant decrease in text comprehension over nonmetalinguistic verbalization. Furthermore, both types of verbalization significantly increased the amount of time on task.

Flege, Bohn, and Jang (1997) and Escudero and Boersma (2004) analyzed first language-Spanish second language-English listeners' perception of English /i/–/i/ continua that varied in spectral and duration properties. They compared individuals and groups on the basis of spectral reliance and duration reliance measures. These reliance measures indicate the change in identification rates from one extreme of the stimulus space to the other; they make use of only a portion of the data collected and suffer from a ceiling effect. The current paper presents a reanalysis of Escudero and Boersma's data using first-order logistic regression modeling. All of the available data contribute to the calculation of logistic regression coefficients, and they do not suffer from the same ceiling effect as the reliance measures. It is argued that—as a metric of cue weighting—logistic regression coefficients offer methodological and substantive advantages over the reliance measures.My thanks to Paola Escudero and Paul Boersma for making their data available, and thanks to Terrance M. Nearey for comments on an earlier draft of this paper (any defects are my own responsibility). This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Swain's (1985, 1995, 2000) output hypothesis states that language production is facilitative of second language (L2) learning. An important component of the output hypothesis involves pushing learners to produce appropriate, accurate, and complex language (Swain, 1993), which may occur when interlocutors provide learners with negative feedback (Gass, 1997, 2003; Long, 1996; Mackey, in press; Pica, 1994; Swain & Lapkin, 1995). When learners modify their previous utterances in response to negative feedback, learning opportunities are created by both the provision of negative feedback and the production of modified output. Consequently, it is difficult to determine how these interactional features—alone or in combination—positively impact L2 development. The current study examines the impact of negative feedback and learners' responses on English as a second language (ESL) question development, which is operationalized as stage advancement in Pienemann and Johnston's developmental sequence for ESL question formation (Pienemann & Johnston, 1987; Pienemann, Johnston, & Brindley, 1988). Thai English as a foreign language (EFL) learners (n = 60) carried out a series of communicative tasks with native English speakers in four conditions that provided different negative feedback and modified output opportunities and also completed four oral production tests over an 8-week period. Analysis of the treatment data identified the amount of modified output involving developmentally advanced question forms produced by the learners, and analysis of the test data revealed whether the learners' stage assignment changed over time. Logistic regression indicated that the only significant predictor of ESL question development was the production of modified output involving developmentally advanced question forms in response to negative feedback.I am grateful to Alison Mackey for her insightful comments on this paper and on the dissertation research on which it is based. I also thank Rhonda Oliver, Jeff Connor-Linton, Jennifer Leeman, Jenefer Philp, Ana-Maria Nuevo, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable comments. Any errors, of course, are my own.

La Créolisation: Théorie, Applications, Implications [Creolization: Theory, Applications, Implications]. Robert Chaudenson. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003. Pp. 479. 39.5 € paper.

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.

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.

SEMANTICS (2nd ed.). John I. Saeed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xx + 413. $68.95 cloth, $32.95 paper.

After a long dry spell in which there were few—if any—satisfactory introductory texts in semantics and pragmatics available, the first edition of Saeed's Semantics appeared in 1997. Since then, a number of other texts have appeared: de Swart's Introduction to natural language semantics (1998), Kearns' Semantics (2000), Allan's Natural language semantics (2001), among others. The primary advantage of the original Saeed text as well as this revised and updated version is its comprehensiveness. It includes descriptive lexical semantics, an introduction to formal semantics, the cognitive approaches of Lakoff and others, and more pragmatics than most of its competitors.

This paper reports replications of studies of implicit artificial grammar (AG) learning and explicit series-solution learning with experienced second language learners in order to examine their population and content generalizability. As found by Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt (1991), there was significantly greater variance in explicit compared to implicit learning. In contrast to Reber et al.'s findings, intelligence quotient (IQ) was significantly negatively related to implicit learning. As found by Knowlton and Squire (1996), chunks that appeared with high frequency (high chunk-strength) in AG training influenced incorrect acceptance of ungrammatical transfer test items containing them but did not affect the judgments of grammatical items. In a third experiment, learners semantically processed sentences in Samoan, a novel language for this population. This experiment found little evidence for the content generalizability of these AG findings to the incidental learning of Samoan. Implicit AG and incidental Samoan learning had different patterns of correlation with cognitive abilities (IQ, working memory, and aptitude) and differed in sensitivity to chunk-strength. As found for AG learning, high chunk-strength negatively affected correct rejection of ungrammatical Samoan transfer test items. Additionally, high chunk-strength negatively affected correct acceptance of grammatical items. For these grammatical items, the number of chunks they contained—not their frequency during training—positively influenced grammaticality judgments.I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and advice on this paper given by the editors of this special issue, Jan Hulstijn and Rod Ellis, and also by Nick Ellis, Barbara Knowlton, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers.

PARAMETER SETTING IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Dalila Ayoun. New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. x + 212. $110.00 cloth.

This book presents an overview of the parameter setting theory of learnability in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition within the generative linguistic framework. It also attempts to challenge and refine common assumptions underlying the model. The book comprises five central chapters as well as short introductory and concluding chapters. The introductory chapter summarizes the general aim of the book and the specific aims of the chapters to follow. In chapter 2, Ayoun presents historical background on the concept of parameter throughout different versions of generative linguistics and distinguishes the standard notion of parameter from the notions of associated clusters of structures, microparameters (referring to structures), and macroparameters (which apply to a family of typologically different languages). This chapter also reviews the concept of parameter setting for language changes, creole formation, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, ending with a brief discussion of Universal Grammar and the Critical Period Hypothesis. In brief, this chapter argues that the parameter setting approach is a model worthy of further development and refinement, capable of explaining and predicting a wide range of phenomena in linguistic theory and its applications despite misunderstandings and lack of clarity in the field.