Twenty years ago, a state-of-the-art review in SSLA marked the coming of age of the study of temporality in second language acquisition. This was followed by three monographs on tense and aspect the next year. This article presents a state-of-the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research addressing the aspect hypothesis (AH) (Andersen, 1991, 2002; Andersen & Shirai, 1994, 1996), the most tested hypothesis in L2 temporality research. The first section of the article gives an overview of the AH and examines its central tenets, and then explores the results of empirical studies that test the hypothesis. The second section considers studies that have investigated four crucial variables in the acquisition of temporality and the testing of the AH. The third section discusses theoretically motivated areas of future research within the framework of the hypothesis.

There is growing evidence that L2 learners pick up new words while viewing video but little is known about the role of individual differences. This study explores incidental learning after viewing a French documentary containing 15 pseudowords and investigates whether learning is moderated by participants’ prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory. Sixty-three higher-intermediate learners of French participated in this study. Prior vocabulary knowledge was measured by means of a French meaning recognition test. Participants also took a forward digit-span (phonological short-term memory), a backward digit-span, and an operation-span task (complex working memory). After viewing the video, four surprise vocabulary tests on form and meaning were administered. Results revealed that learning gains occurred at the level of form and meaning recognition. Vocabulary knowledge was positively related to picking up new words from video. Complex working memory correlated with the recognition tests showing more incidental learning gains for learners with higher complex working memory.

The study examined the predictions of regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000) in relation to task-based incidental vocabulary learning. A total of 189 English as a second language learners completed a vocabulary pretest, a regulatory focus questionnaire, an integrated reading/writing task, and finally an unannounced vocabulary posttest. The participants were randomly assigned to two task conditions. In the gain condition, they started the task with zero points and had to gain 75 points to enter a drawing to win one of three $100 gift cards; in the loss condition, they started with 100 points and had to avoid losing more than 25 points. Multiple regression results partly supported the regulatory fit predictions. Prevention individuals learned significantly more vocabulary items in the loss condition than in the gain condition; but promotion individuals did not learn significantly more vocabulary items in the gain condition than in the loss condition. Theoretical and pedagogical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

This meta-analysis investigated the overall effects of glossing on L2 vocabulary learning from reading and the influence of potential moderator variables: gloss format (type, language, mode) and text and learner characteristics. A total of 359 effect sizes from 42 studies (N = 3802) meeting the inclusion criteria were meta-analyzed. The results indicated that glossed reading led to significantly greater learning of words (45.3% and 33.4% on immediate and delayed posttests, respectively) than nonglossed reading (26.6% and 19.8%). Multiple-choice glosses were the most effective, and in-text glosses and glossaries were the least effective gloss types. L1 glosses yielded greater learning than L2 glosses. We found no interaction between language (L1, L2) and proficiency (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and no significant difference among modes of glossing (textual, pictorial, auditory). Learning gains were moderated by test formats (recall, recognition, other), comprehension of text, and proficiency.

The distinction of two types of intransitive verbs—unergatives (with underlying subjects) and unaccusatives (with underlying objects)—may not exist at early stages of L2 acquisition, both being syntactically represented as unergatives. This idea, referred to here as the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis, provides an elegant developmental account for a variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic phenomena in L2 English, Japanese, and Chinese. Target language input, structural constraints on natural language linking rules, and linguistic properties of a learner's L1s shape stages in the reorganization of the lexical and syntactic components of interlanguage grammars. Although nonnative grammars may initially override the structural constraints postulated as the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) and the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (Baker, 1988), at later developmental stages some may still achieve conformity with the norms of natural languages.

A quarter of a century has passed since complex dynamic systems theory was proposed as an alternative paradigm to rethink and reexamine some of the main questions and phenomena in applied linguistics and language learning. In this article, we report a scoping review of the heterogenous body of research adopting this framework. We analyzed 158 reports satisfying our inclusion criteria (89 journal articles and 69 dissertations) for methodological characteristics and substantive contributions. We first highlight methodological trends in the report pool using a framework for dynamic method integration at the levels of study aim, unit of analysis, and choice of method. We then survey the main substantive contribution this body of research has made to the field. Finally, examination of study quality in these reports revealed a number of potential areas of improvement. We synthesize these insights in what we call the “nine tenets” of complex dynamic systems theory research, which we hope will help enhance the methodological rigor and the substantive contribution of future research.

Two commonly used test types to assess vocabulary knowledge for the purpose of reading are size and levels tests. This article first reviews several frequently stated purposes of such tests (e.g., materials selection, tracking vocabulary growth) and provides a reasoned argument for the precision needed to serve such purposes. Then three sources of inaccuracy in existing tests are examined: the overestimation of lexical knowledge from guessing or use of test strategies under meaning-recognition item formats; the overestimation of vocabulary knowledge when receptive understanding of all word family members is assumed from a correct response to an item assessing knowledge of just one family member; and the limited precision that a small, random sample of target words has in representing the population of words from which it is drawn. The article concludes that existing tests lack the accuracy needed for many specified testing purposes and discusses possible improvements going forward.

Much of the research on L2 article acquisition has investigated the effects of semantic, syntactic, and discourse universals on the systematicity and variability of learners' article use. The present paper looks at systematicity from the combined perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity (e.g., Givón, 1983) that have been addressed only separately in past studies of article acquisition: the tendency to mark the distinction between topics and comments (e.g., Huebner, 1983) and the tendency to mark the distinction between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents (e.g., Chaudron & Parker, 1990). The present study examines how well these discourse universals account for the patterns of article use and nonuse found in narratives written by 199 Finnish-speaking and 145 Swedish-speaking adolescent learners of English. The quantitative results of the study cast some doubt on learners' sensitivity to the topic-comment distinction and also suggest that learners' tendency to mark distinctions between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents is influenced by the prominence of such distinctions in the L1. The quantitative results are supported by a qualitative analysis of a subset of the data that suggests numerous other elements that are needed to characterize the systematicity of individual learners' interlanguage article systems.

There has been little research investigating how mode of input affects incidental vocabulary learning, and no study examining how it affects the learning of multiword items. The aim of this study was to investigate incidental learning of L2 collocations in three different modes: reading, listening, and reading while listening. One hundred thirty-eight second-year college students learning EFL in Taiwan were randomly assigned to three experimental groups (reading, listening, reading while listening) and a no treatment control group. The experimental groups encountered 17 target collocations in the same graded reader. Learning was measured using two tests that involved matching the component words and recalling their meanings. The results indicated that the reading while listening condition was most effective while the reading and listening conditions contributed to similarly sized gains. The findings suggest that listening may play a more important role in learning collocations than single-word items.

This paper has two main objectives: (a) to put the vast body of research on Swedish as a second language (SSL) into one coherent framework; and (b) to test the predictions deriving from processability theory (Pienemann, 1998a, 1998b) for Swedish against this empirical database. We will survey the 14 most prominent research projects on SSL covering wide areas of syntax and morphology in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. This survey is the first to be carried out for Swedish, and it will bring the body of two decades of research into one unified framework. We proceed in the following steps: First, a brief summary of processability theory is given. Then the theory is used to generate a unifying framework for the development of the specific L2 grammatical system (Swedish). Finally, the new framework is tested in the above-mentioned empirical studies.

Williams’s (2005) study on “learning without awareness” and three subsequent extensions (Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011; Hama & Leow, 2010; Rebuschat, Hamrick, Sachs, Riestenberg, & Ziegler, 2013) have reported conflicting results, perhaps in part due to differences in how awareness has been measured. The present extension of Williams (2005) addresses this possibility directly by triangulating data from three awareness measures: concurrent verbal reports (think-aloud protocols), retrospective verbal reports (postexposure interviews), and subjective measures (confidence ratings and source attributions). Participants were exposed to an artificial determiner system under incidental learning conditions. One experimental group thought aloud during training, another thought aloud during training and testing, and a third remained silent, as did a trained control group. All participants were then tested by means of a forced-choice task to establish whether learning took place. In addition, all participants provided confidence ratings and source attributions on test items and were interviewed following the test. Our results indicate that, although all experimental groups displayed learning effects, only the silent group was able to generalize the acquired knowledge to novel instances. Comparisons of concurrent and retrospective verbal report data shed light on the conflicting findings previously reported in the literature and highlight important methodological issues in implicit and explicit learning research.

I wish to warn young men against the invincible attraction of theories which simplify and unify seductively. Ruled by the [reticularist] theory, we who were active in histology then saw networks everywhere [italics added].… This [reticularist theory] was admirably convenient, since it did away with all need for the analytical effort involved in determining in each case the course through the gray matter followed by the nervous impulse. It has rightly been said that the reticular hypothesis, by dint of pretending to explain everything easily and simply, explains absolutely nothing; and, what is more serious, it hinders and almost makes superfluous future inquiries regarding the intimate organization of the centers [italics added]. (Ramóny Cajal, 1989, pp. 303–337)

This study focuses on beginning second language learners’ attention to irregular verb morphology, an area of grammar that many adults find difficult to acquire (e.g., DeKeyser, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2010). We measured beginning learners’ eye movements during sentence processing to investigate whether or not they actually attend to irregular verb features and, if so, whether the amount of attention that they pay to these features predicts their acquisition. On the assumption that attention facilitates learning (e.g., Gass, 1997; Robinson, 2003; Schmidt, 2001), we expected more attention (i.e., longer fixations or more frequent comparisons between verb forms) to lead to more learning of the irregular verbs. Forty beginning learners of German read 12 German sentence pairs with stem-changing verbs and 12 German sentence pairs with regular verbs while an Eyelink 1000 recorded their eye movements. The stem-changing verbs consisted of six a → ä changing verbs and six e → i(e) changing verbs. Each verb appeared in a baseline sentence in the first-person singular, which has no stem change, and a critical sentence in the second- or third-person singular, which have a stem change for the irregular but not the regular verbs, on the same screen. Productive pre- and posttests measured the effects of exposure on learning. Results indicate that learners looked longer overall at stem-changing verbs than regular verbs, revealing a late effect of verb irregularity on reading times. Longer total times had a modest, favorable effect on the subsequent production of the stem vowel. Finally, the production of only the a → ä verbs—not the e → i(e) verbs—benefited from direct visual comparisons during reading, possibly because of the umlaut in the former. We interpret the results with reference to recent theory and research on attention, noticing, and language learning and provide a more nuanced and empirically based understanding of the noticing construct.

Recent perspectives on language transfer have highlighted the role of psychotypology and have given new life to Newmark's ignorance hypothesis. This paper examines such perspectives in the light of a body of data in French from a beginning learner of that language whose native language is English but who in addition has some knowledge of Irish, Latin, and Spanish. The fact that Spanish emerges as a privileged transfer source seems to point to a psychotypology factor, and certain distributional and contextual evidence appears to show that ignorance is in many cases triggering thè transfers. However, because ignorance does not seem to explain all cases, some speculation is entered into, on the basis of clues in the data, regarding the role of memory codes in transfer.

The main purpose of the current study was to examine the relative significance of vocabulary knowledge (VK) and syntactic knowledge (SK) in second language (L2) listening ability, while accounting for the effect of several cognitive and affective factors. A total of 263 English-as-a-foreign-language learners took a standardized listening test (IELTS), as well as a battery of nine linguistic (two aural SK tests and two aural VK tests—covering both breadth and depth of VK), cognitive (two working memory tests and a metacognitive knowledge questionnaire), and affective measures (two L2 listening anxiety questionnaires). Structural equation modeling analysis revealed that both VK and SK were significant predictors of L2 listening ability; however, VK was a stronger predictor with an effect size being almost twice as much as the one for SK (.55 vs. .28). The results also showed that metacognitive knowledge, working memory, and L2 listening anxiety are significant predictors of L2 listening ability.

The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native speakers (NSs) of English as well as less of a difference in duration between the two types of vowel than the NSs. The Japanese speakers, whose native language has a phonemic length distinction, produced more nativelike durational patterns. Finally, the vowel quality (first and second formant frequencies) of unstressed vowels was different from the NS group's for the late bilinguals, for whom unstressed vowels were widely dispersed in the vowel space according to their orthographic representations, and from the early Korean bilinguals, who substituted the Korean high central vowel. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of the phonological status of first language phonetic features and age of acquisition.This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation (KRF-2003-042-A00048) and partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (DC05132). A draft of this research was presented at the English phonology workshop division held for the 50th anniversary of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (June 2004). The authors would like to thank four anonymous SSLA reviewers and Jonathan Loftin for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA—specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate syntactic and pragmatic or discursive knowledge, an interface at which L2 learners have been shown to encounter difficulties (e.g., Sorace, 1993; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). The data come from (a) an 8.5-hr corpus that consists of recordings of 10 dyadic conversations between near-native and native speakers of French and (b) two contextualized paper and audio tasks that tested intuitions and preferences regarding LD. Analyses of the near-native speakers’ production of LDs, the syntactic properties of their LDs, and their use of LDs to promote different types of discourse referents to topic status suggest that their mastery of this aspect of discourse organization converges on that of native speakers.

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, intermediate English-Spanish learners rely more on salient adverbs than on less salient verb inflections, but it is not clear whether this preference is a result of a default or a L1-based strategy. To address this question, 120 English (poor morphology) and Romanian (rich morphology) learners of Spanish (rich morphology) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 in the case of the monolinguals) containing adverb-verb and verb-adverb congruencies or incongruencies and chose one of four pictures after each sentence (i.e., two that competed for meaning and two for form). Eye-tracking data revealed significant effects for (a) sensitivity (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), (b) cue location in the sentence (participants spent more time at their preferred cue, regardless of its position), (c) L1 experience (morphologically rich L1 learners and monolinguals looked longer at verbs than morphologically poor L1 learners and monolinguals), and (d) L2 experience (low-proficiency learners read more slowly and regressed longer than high-proficiency learners). We conclude that intermediate and advanced learners are sensitive to tense incongruencies and—like native speakers—tend to rely more heavily on verbs if their L1 is morphologically rich. These findings reinforce theories that support transfer effects such as the unified competition model and the associative learning model but do not contradict Clahsen and Felser’s (2006a) shallow structure hypothesis because the target structure was morphological agreement rather than syntactic agreement.

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.