Research has consistently shown there is a negative correlation between age of onset (AO) of acquisition and ultimate attainment (UA) of either pronunciation or grammar in a second language (L2). A few studies have indeed reported nativelike behavior in some postpuberty learners with respect to either phonetics/phonology or morphosyntax, a result that has sometimes been taken as evidence against the critical period hypothesis (CPH). However, in the few studies that have employed a wide range of linguistic tests and tasks, adult learners have not exhibited nativelike L2 proficiency across the board of measures, which, according to some, suggests that the hypothesis still holds. The present study investigated the relationship between AO and UA and the incidence of nativelikeness when measures of phonetic and grammatical intuition are combined. An additional aim was to investigate whether children and adults develop the L2 through fundamentally different brain mechanisms—namely, whether children acquire the language (more) implicitly as an interdependent whole, whereas adults learn it (more) explicitly as independent parts of a whole.

Within the field of SLA, the incidence of nativelikeness in second language (L2) speakers has typically been explained as a function of age of acquisition. An alternative interpretation, however, is that L2 learners do not attain nativelike proficiency because of first language (L1) maintenance. This interpretation has nevertheless remained mostly theoretical due to the lack of empirical evidence. This study sets out to address the role of L1 proficiency in L2 ultimate attainment by examining L1 and L2 proficiency in 30 early L1 Spanish–L2 Swedish bilinguals. Language proficiency was assessed through grammaticality judgment tests and cloze tests, and additional data on language aptitude were collected through the Swansea Language Aptitude Test (v.2.0; Meara, Milton, & Lorenzo-Dus, 2002). The results showed positive correlations between nativelike L1 and L2 behavior. Additionally, it was found that language aptitude was positively correlated with nativelike L1 and L2 performance. In view of these findings, it is suggested that (a) L1 maintenance does not hamper L2 nativelikeness and (b) language aptitude is an important factor for bilingual ultimate attainment.

The purpose of this article is to offer contextual linguistic explanations for morphosyntactic deviances (MSDs) in high-level second language (L2) French (30 nonnative speakers vs. 10 native speakers). It is hypothesized that the distribution of formulaic sequences (FSs) and the complexity of information structure will influence the occurrence of MSDs. The study reports that MSDs rarely occur within FSs, and if they do, they occur within sequences containing open slots for creative rule application. The rhematic part of the utterance attracts more MSDs due to the fact that this part is more syntactically complex than the preamble (the thematic part). An additional explanation is the mean length of the rhematic part, which is longer than the preamble and implies a higher processing load. A final explanation of MSD occurrence in the rheme is linked to the distribution of FSs in the information structure. The results are discussed in relation to the ongoing debate on the constructs of complexity, accuracy, and fluency—a promising area of study.

This article reports on the design and use of a profiler for lexical sophistication (i.e., use of advanced vocabulary), which was created to assess the lexical richness of intermediate and advanced Swedish second language (L2) learners’ French and Italian. It discusses how teachers’ judgments (TJs) of word difficulty can contribute to the methodology for lexical profiling and compares two methods, one purely frequency based and one modified on the basis of TJs of word difficulty. It has been suggested elsewhere that factors other than frequency play an important role in vocabulary acquisition. Here it is argued that cognates and thematic vocabulary related to teaching materials, although infrequent in target language (TL) corpora, should not necessarily be considered advanced and that analyses of learners’ lexical sophistication would benefit from integrating these aspects. In this study, the frequency-based method normally used in lexical profiling was modified by recategorizing some low-frequency words considered easy by many teachers. On the basis of the TJs, a basic vocabulary, which consisted mainly of high-frequency words but also of cognates and thematic words, was defined, which was based on the fact that teachers judged certain low-frequency cognates and thematic words as relatively easy. Using the modified method, learners’ lexical profiles were found to be more homogeneous within groups of learners at specific proficiency levels. The superiority of the new method over the purely frequency-based one was shown when comparing effect sizes. It is argued that this method gives a more correct picture of advanced L2 lexical profiles.

This article makes a case for studying the perceptions that young people have of the ways of speaking of both themselves and others on the supposition that constructions of ambient sociolinguistic variation have an impact on the language development and use of individual language users. Such a study is particularly relevant in multilingual contexts in which differences with regard to social as well as ethnic and linguistic background may generate significantly different perceptions. In a speaker evaluation study, Swedish speech stimuli from 12 young Stockholmers were evaluated by 343 listeners from different backgrounds. The results show that young people may divide and relate to the linguistic space of Stockholm in very different ways and that they vary in their degree of accuracy regarding linguistic self-perception.

High-proficiency second language (L2) learners challenge much theory and methodology in contemporary sociolinguistic and L2 acquisition research, which suggests the need for honest interdisciplinarity when working in the interstices of style, stylization, and advanced acquisition processes. When to consider fluent and highly competent speakers of a language to be language learners in ways relevant to SLA theory is a fraught and contentious issue. This study suggests that highly fluent multilinguals provide key data on notions of nativelikeness and near-nativelikeness that are of value for understanding processes of acquisition and use. It suggests that relative judgments of nativelikeness are interactionally accomplished (membership) categorizations made on the basis of specific linguistic features relative to particular linguistic markets. The data for the study are taken from a unique population—namely, young people from multilingual family backgrounds, born and raised in Sweden, all of whom ethnically self-identify as Assyrian-Syrian but whose repertoires are complexly multilingual. All participants are generally perceived to be native speakers of Swedish on a daily basis. Nevertheless, at certain moments, these young people are reclassified as near-native or nativelike. The study analyzes their narrative accounts of metalinguistic reflexivity from occasions and interactional moments when they are classified as nonstandard speakers and, therefore, near-natives or learners. The findings suggest the necessity of revisiting notions of nativelikeness and account for the phenomenon in terms of register, voice, and identity relative to different symbolic and linguistic markets.