Previous research suggests that native speakers quickly adapt to the properties of the language in the surrounding context. For instance, as they repeatedly read a structure that is initially nonpreferred or infrequent, they show a reduction of processing difficulty. Adaptation has been accounted for in terms of error-based learning: the error resulting from the difference between the expected and actual input leads to an adjustment of the knowledge representation, which changes future expectations. The present study tested whether experiencing an error is sufficient for adaptation. We compared native English speakers and second language (L2) learners’ processing of, and adaptation to, two types of temporarily ambiguous structures that were resolved toward the nonpreferred interpretation. Whereas both native English and L2 speakers showed increased reading times at the disambiguating word versus a nonambiguous control, our data suggest that only native English speakers adapted, and only to one of the two structures. These results suggest that experiencing an error is not sufficient for adaptation, and that factors such as ease of revision and task effects may play a role as well.

Bilinguals are susceptible to interaction between their two phonetic systems during speech processing. Using a language-switching paradigm, this study investigated differences in phonetic transfer of Cantonese–English bilingual adults with various language dominance profiles (Cantonese-dominant, English-dominant, and balanced bilinguals). Measurements of voice onset time revealed that unbalanced bilinguals and balanced bilinguals responded differently to language switching. Among unbalanced bilinguals, production of the dominant language shifted toward the nondominant language, with no effect in the opposite direction. However, balanced bilinguals’ speech production was unaffected by language switching. These results are analogous to the inhibitory control model, suggesting an asymmetrical switch cost of language switching at the phonetic level of speech production in unbalanced bilinguals. In contrast, the absence of switch cost in balanced bilinguals implies differences in the mechanism underlying balanced bilinguals’ and unbalanced bilinguals’ speech production.

This study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing second language conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.

It has been documented that lipreading facilitates the understanding of difficult speech, such as noisy speech and time-compressed speech. However, relatively little work has addressed the role of visual information in perceiving accented speech, another type of difficult speech. In this study, we specifically focus on accented word recognition. One hundred forty-two native English speakers made lexical decision judgments on English words or nonwords produced by speakers with Mandarin Chinese accents. The stimuli were presented as either as videos that were of a relatively far speaker or as videos in which we zoomed in on the speaker’s head. Consistent with studies of degraded speech, listeners were more accurate at recognizing accented words when they saw lip movements from the closer apparent distance. The effect of apparent distance tended to be larger under nonoptimal conditions: when stimuli were nonwords than words, and when stimuli were produced by a speaker who had a relatively strong accent. However, we did not find any influence of listeners’ prior experience with Chinese accented speech, suggesting that cross-talker generalization is limited. The current study provides practical suggestions for effective communication between native and nonnative speakers: visual information is useful, and it is more useful in some circumstances than others.

When speaking in any language, speakers must conceptualize what they want to say before they can formulate and articulate their message. We present two experiments employing a novel experimental paradigm in which the formulating and articulating stages of speech production were kept identical across conditions of differing conceptualizing difficulty. We tracked the effect of difficulty in conceptualizing during the generation of speech (Experiment 1) and during the abandonment and regeneration of speech (Experiment 2) on speaking fluency by Dutch native speakers in their first (L1) and second (L2) language (English). The results showed that abandoning and especially regenerating a speech plan taxes the speaker, leading to disfluencies. For most fluency measures, the increases in disfluency were similar across L1 and L2. However, a significant interaction revealed that abandoning and regenerating a speech plan increases the time needed to solve conceptual difficulties while speaking in the L2 to a greater degree than in the L1. This finding supports theories in which cognitive resources for conceptualizing are shared with those used for later stages of speech planning. Furthermore, a practical implication for language assessment is that increasing the conceptual difficulty of speaking tasks should be considered with caution.

We examined to what extent the variation in vocabulary learning outcomes (vocabulary knowledge, learning gain, and rate of forgetting) in English as a second language (L2) in context can be predicted from semantic contextual support, word characteristics (cognate status, Levenshtein distance, word frequency, and word length), and student characteristics (prior vocabulary knowledge, reading ability, and exposure to English) in 197 Dutch adolescents. Students were taught cognates, false friends, and control words through judging sentences with varying degrees of semantic contextual support using a pretest/posttest between subjects design. Participants were presented with an English target word and its Dutch translation, followed by an English sentence. They were instructed to judge the plausibility of the sentence. Mixed-efffects models indicated that learning gains were higher for sentences with more semantic contextual support and in students with stronger reading comprehension skills. We were the first to show that Levenshtein distance is an important predictor for L2 vocabulary learning outcomes. Furthermore, more accurate as well as faster learning task performance lead to higher learning outcomes. It can thus be concluded that L2 study materials containing semantically supportive contexts and that focus on words with little L1-L2 overlap are most effective for L2 vocabulary learning.

Linguists have described the English vocabulary as including Latinate and basic subsystems. In three experiments with a total of 93 participants, we asked whether skilled readers are sensitive to graphotactic differences between these systems. Participants saw pairs of nonwords and were asked to choose the item in each pair that appeared more wordlike. Participants were more likely to select an item with an onset and an ending that suggested the same system than an item with a mismatch. Participants also used the presence of a single versus double medial consonant as a marker of the system to which an item belongs. The results suggest that skilled readers have learned about some of the graphotactic differences between Latinate and basic words and do not treat English as a monolithic system.

Building on the extensive work conceptualizing, developing, and validating foreign language aptitude for successful second language acquisition (e.g., Skehan, 2015, in Applied Linguistics), the current project expounded the cognitive abilities relevant and instrumental to adult Japanese classroom learners’ pronunciation attainment of English /ɹ/. The speech production of 50 Japanese participants was elicited, acoustically analyzed, and linked to different aspects of their aptitude profiles (phonemic coding, associative memory, and sequence recognition). Whereas those with higher phonemic coding demonstrated better performance in a relatively easy dimension of English /ɹ/ pronunciation (lower F2 for tongue retraction), those with greater associative memory demonstrated more advanced performance in the relatively difficult dimensions of English /ɹ/ pronunciation (longer transition duration for phonemic length; lower F3 for labial/alveolar/pharyngeal constrictions). The role of incidental learning aptitude (i.e., sequence recognition) remained unclear. The findings here indicate that explicit aptitude related to phonological analysis and memory may play a key role in predicting the incidence of advanced second language segmental proficiency attainment in classroom settings.

This study examined the extent to which explicit instruction about first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing routines improved the accuracy, speed, and automaticity of learners’ responses during sentence interpretation practice. Fifty-three English-speaking learners of L2 French were assigned to one of the following treatments: (a) a “core” treatment consisting of L2 explicit information (EI) with L2 interpretation practice (L2-only group); (b) the same L2 core+L1 practice with L1 EI (L2+L1 group); or (c) the same L2 core+L1 practice but without L1 EI (L2+L1prac group). Findings indicated that increasing amounts of practice led to more accurate and faster performance only for learners who received L1 EI (L2+L1 group). Coefficient of variation analyses (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993) indicated knowledge restructuring early on that appeared to lead to gradual automatization over time (Solovyeva & DeKeyser, 2017; Suzuki, 2017). Our findings that EI and practice about L1 processing routines benefited the accuracy, speed, and automaticity of L2 performance have major implications for theories of L2 learning, the role of L1 EI in L2 grammar learning, and L2 pedagogy.