Ellis (2005) and his coresearchers developed a number of tests with a view to providing relatively separate measures of explicit and implicit knowledge. The aim in the development of these tests was to resolve a continuing problem in SLA studies—namely the construct validity of tests used to measure acquisition—and, more specifically, to provide a basis for investigating the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge (i.e., the strong interface, the weak interface, and the noninterface positions).

This paper is based on ongoing research on a recent low-dose, late partial English immersion (IM) program in Germany. The evaluation compares English language outcomes of IM groups, groups from non-IM schools, and non-IM groups from the same school as the IM groups, at various points of their development. This paper focuses on whether English vocabulary learning occurs incidentally while students are learning history or geography, or both, taught in English and whether there is evidence to suggest that the learning abilities activated in the IM classroom are the same as those found in traditional foreign language teaching and in naturalistic (untutored) L2 acquisition. The data derive from a communicative group test. It is shown that some of the lexical items cannot have come from the textbook or from other kinds of teaching materials used during regular foreign language instruction in the program. This leaves the teacher's oral use of English as the most likely source. Several implications for L2 acquisition theory and teaching practice are discussed.

Many studies on bilingual language processing have shown that lexical access is not selective with respect to language. These studies typically used nouns as word stimuli. The aim of the present study was to extend the previous findings on noun processing to verb processing. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in their second language and were faster to recognize cognate verbs (e.g., Dutch-English geven-give) presented out of context than control words. This verb cognate facilitation effect was not modulated by verb tense. In a second experiment, cognates and controls were presented in sentence contexts while eye movements were recorded. In contrast to the strong cognate facilitation effects on early and later reading time measures for nouns found in earlier studies, cognate facilitation was only observed on a later reading time measure (i.e., go-past time). An interpretation of the results within current models of bilingual language processing and lexical organization is provided.

This study investigates whether gestures can be used during recasts to enhance the saliency of a target structure (locative prepositions) and to lead to better production of the target structure. Forty-eight low-intermediate English as a second language (ESL) students partook in communicative activities during which they received either no feedback (control), verbal recasts only (R), or recasts plus gesture (RG), and a subset of participants completed a stimulated recall session. Then the pretest, immediate, and delayed posttest scores of grammar and oral production tests were used to analyze the linguistic development. The results showed that no one commented on recasts or locative prepositions during the stimulated recall session and that there were no significant changes in grammar test scores in all conditions; however, the R and RG conditions performed significantly better in the production test than the control in the immediate posttest. Furthermore, the RG condition maintained the development in the delayed posttest, whereas the R condition did not.

Academic lectures are potential sources of vocabulary learning for second language learners studying at universities where English is the medium of instruction, as well as those in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. Topic-related vocabulary is likely to occur frequently in academic texts, and academic speech consists of a reasonable proportion of frequently occurring sequences of words. Yet no intervention studies have explored the potential for learning single words and collocations through viewing a video of an unmodified academic lecture. To address this gap, this study collected data from 55 EAP learners in China, following a pretest-posttest design. The experimental group (n = 28) watched a video of an academic lecture in which 50 target single words and 19 target collocations were presented while the control group (n = 27) received no treatment. Results show that viewing the lecture led to significant learning gains of single words at the meaning recall level and collocations at the form recognition level. Frequency of occurrence in the lecture appeared to significantly contribute to the learning of single words but not the learning of collocations. Prior knowledge of general vocabulary appeared to make no significant contribution to the learning of single words and collocations.

This study considers the role of instruction, second language (L2) input, first language (L1) transfer, and Universal Grammar (UG) in the development of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. Specifically, it investigates the acquisition of the Spanish morpheme se by English-speaking adult learners. Participants included 91 university students and 30 Spanish native-speaker controls. Learners received form-focused, communicative instruction on se for one week and were tested before, immediately following, and 24 days after the treatment period. Assessment consisted of a grammaticality judgment task and two production tasks using se in a variety of verb classes. The results showed that se had been added to many learners' grammars, but also that L1-derived forms and overgeneralization errors had not been completely preempted. These findings are taken as evidence that the development of L2 grammars is affected by a number of independent, yet cooperating, knowledge sources, which thus supports a modular account of L2 acquisition.

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Experiment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between articles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases.

The paper examines the influence of the formal classroom as a learning environment on the discourse behaviour of advanced German students of English in conversations with English native speakers. It is proposed that FL teaching as a causal factor in the formation of IL-specific rules can operate either directly, in presenting the learner with FL material which deviates from target norms, or indirectly, by triggering off psycholinguistic processes which in turn lead to IL-specific rule formation. These are referred to as primary and secondary teaching induction, respectively. On a more concrete level, the impact of two constituents of FL teaching on IL discourse is discussed:

(1) the textbook and other teaching materials;

(2) classroom specific discourse norms.

The influence of the first factor type manifests itself primarily in (a) the use of an inappropriately formal register, (b) an inappropriate use of modal verbs. The second factor type is found to result in (a) rising intonation with non-interrogative function, (b) inappropriate propositional explicitness of speech act realizations and discourse functions, (c) “complete sentence” responses, (d) a lack of marking for expressive and relational functions (“speech act modality”).

In conclusion of the data analysis, a classroom specific pidgin will be hypothesized which, when transferred to non-classroom settings, leads to pragmatically inappropriate communicative behaviour.

On a more general level, it will be postulated that second language acquisition hypotheses should be formulated with reference to specific types of acquisition/learning contexts.

Recent research considers native reactions to various aspects of non-native speech and associated judgments regarding such speakers. The studies discussed here view listeners, speakers, and language from a variety of perspectives employing both objective and subjective research paradigms. Interlocutor variables which have been found to influence linguistic perceptions include age, social status, degree of bilingualism, and educational level. Even the linguistic sophistication of the listener may be important.

Studies of error gravity, which treat the perceived seriousness of error types in learners' interlanguage, may now be contrasted with data from several related and unrelated languages. The relative intelligibility of language samples has also been investigated as has the role of comprehension in the information of linguistic judgments.

Research reflecting listeners' personal impressions and reactions shows that non-natives tend to be downgraded in contexts ranging from the classroom to the workplace. This area of experimentation would be enhanced by exploration of the issues through studies in natural sociolinguistic contexts.

This study investigated the underlying structure of a set of eight cognitive tests from the two most recent language aptitude test batteries: the LLAMA (Meara, 2005) and the Hi-LAB (Linck et al., 2013) to see whether they had any underlying constructs in common. The study also examined whether any of the observed constructs could predict L2 speaking proficiency in terms of complexity, accuracy, or fluency. Participants were 135 college-level students learning Spanish as an L2 in the United States. Results showed that the LLAMA and the Hi-LAB include tests that tap the same constructs. Specifically, the tests from the two batteries loaded onto three different factors, interpreted as “Explicit Aptitude,” “Implicit Memory Ability,” and “Implicit Learning Ability.” The results further showed that Implicit Memory Ability was a significant predictor of L2 speed fluency and interacted with Implicit Learning Ability as a predictor of lexical complexity. This finding suggested that L2 learners with greater Implicit Memory Ability may be better at accessing and retrieving previously learned or known information effortlessly. In the case of lexical complexity, the effect of Implicit Memory Ability depended on the level of Implicit Learning Ability.

Although Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) has been shown to predict the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in SLA, most studies of the NPAH have been on European languages. This paper tests the prediction for Japanese. Study 1 analyzes RCs in an oral interview corpus from 90 learners of Japanese at four different levels of proficiency (first language = Mandarin Chinese, English, and Korean; N = 30 for each). Analysis of 1005 RCs from nonnative data and 231 RCs from 15 native speakers (NSs) of Japanese revealed that even lower proficiency learners used direct object (DO) and oblique (OBL) relatives, suggesting that subject (SU) relatives are not easier than DO or OBL relatives for second language learners of Japanese. The learners (except Korean NSs) also made strong associations between SU and animate heads and between DO/OBL and inanimate heads. Study 2 employed a sentence-combining experiment. Fifty NSs of Cantonese studying Japanese in Hong Kong took the test, which controlled for the animacy of head noun phrases and arguments of the verbs. Results revealed no significant difference between SU and DO, which were both easier than OBL, with only a minimal effect of animacy. However, errors of converting DO and OBL target items into SU relatives almost exclusively involved animate-head items. The results suggest that the NPAH does not predict the difficulty order of Japanese RCs, and that learners use different types of RCs based on the animacy of the head noun.This paper is based on a paper presented at the Workshop on the L2 Acquisition of Relative Clauses (January 28, 2005, Cornell University). We thank the participants at the workshop (in particular, Stephen Matthews and John Whitman), Kevin Gregg, Zoe Luk, William O'Grady, Wataru Suzuki, and the two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their invaluable comments and discussions. Study 1 is part of the first author's doctoral dissertation, submitted to Ochanomizu University, and has appeared in Japanese (Ozeki, 2005b). Study 2 was conducted at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, supported by a Direct Grant for Research from the university. We thank Alexis Chu, Yumi Inoue, Zoe Luk, and Chi-Ming Ho for their assistance in data collection and/or the construction of the test material and the statistical consultants at Cornell University (in particular, Freedom King) for their assistance.

Implicit negative feedback has been shown to facilitate SLA, and the extent to which such feedback is given is related to a variety of task and interlocutor variables. The background of a native speaker (NS), in terms of amount of experience in interactions with nonnative speakers (NNSs), has been shown to affect the quantity of implicit negative feedback (namely recasts) in a classroom setting. This study examines the effect of experience and uses stimulated recall to attempt to understand the interactional patterns of two groups of NSs (with greater and lesser experience) interacting with second language (L2) learners outside of the classroom context. Two groups of NSs of English each completed an information exchange task with a L2 learner: The first group consisted of 11 preservice teachers with minimal experience with NNSs, whereas the second group included 8 experienced teachers with significant teaching experience. Immediately after the task, each NS participated in a stimulated recall, viewing a videotape of the interaction and commenting on the interaction. The quantitative results did not show a strong difference in the number of recasts used by the two groups, but it did show a difference in the quantity of NNS output between the two groups. This finding was corroborated by the stimulated recalls, which showed that those with experience—who clearly saw themselves as language teachers even outside of the classroom—had strategies for and concerns about getting the learners to produce output. Additionally, the experienced teachers showed greater recognition of student comprehension, student learning, and student problems. Those with little experience were more focused on themselves, on student feelings, and on procedural and task-related issues.

The purpose of this study, which focused on the word taco as spoken in Spanish and English, was to explore the word as a unit in second language (L2) speech acquisition. As expected, acoustic measurements revealed that Spanish and English monolinguals' renditions of taco differed systematically. It was also shown that the extent to which Spanish/English bilinguals approximated English phonetic norms for any one segment of taco was correlated with their approximation for the other three segments, and that early learners differentiated Spanish versus English taco more than did late learners. It also appeared that the bilinguals produced /t/ with less English-like voice onset time (VOT) values in English taco than in other English words without a cognate in Spanish. In a perception experiment, listeners were able to identify the native language of Spanish and English monolinguals on the basis of their production of taco. The listeners heard larger differences between Spanish and English taco tokens spoken by early than late learners of English L2. Two additional perception experiments assessed further the phonetic dimensions that listeners use to determine language identity and to gauge bilinguals' speech production accuracy. Listeners assigned to language identification and goodness rating tasks responded to acoustic information distributed over all four segments in taco, although the VOT of the word-initial /t/ appeared to be the single most important phonetic dimension. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that (a) bilinguals' accuracy in producing the various segments of a second language word may be interrelated and (b) in judging L2 speech, listeners respond to phonetic errors distributed over the entire word.

This study assessed the extent to which captions, textually unenhanced and enhanced, can draw learners’ attention to and promote the acquisition of a second language (L2) grammatical construction. A pretest–posttest–delayed posttest experimental design was employed. Seventy-two Korean learners of English were randomly assigned to an enhanced captions group, an unenhanced captions group, and a no captions group. Each group completed a series of treatment tasks, during which they watched news clips under their respective captioning condition. The target L2 construction was the use of the present perfect versus the past simple in reporting news. For the enhanced captions group, the present perfect and past simple forms were typographically enhanced using a different color. Eye-movement indices were obtained to examine attentional allocation during the treatment, and oral and written productive tests and a fill-in-the-blank test were used to assess participants’ gains. A series of mixed-effects models found both captioning and textual enhancement effective in drawing learners’ attention to and facilitating development in the use of the target construction. In addition, positive links were identified between attention to captions and learners’ gains.

This study investigates loss of productive vocabulary in oral language, specifically in Portuguese as a third language for two English-Hebrew bilingual children, ages 9 and 13. The study investigated the lexical loss in Portuguese storytelling behavior after 1, 3, and 9 months of discontinued contact with the language. The analysis focused on the nature of the attrited productive lexicon, lexical production strategies used to compensate for forgotten vocabulary, and lexical retrieval processes during storytelling in Portuguese and in the children's two dominant languages.

A significant decrease was found in the total number of words produced in the Portuguese stories of the two children after 9 months, both in comparison to word total in earlier months and in comparison to total words in English and Hebrew stories. There was greater attrition in the case of the younger subject after 9 months than in that of his older sister. He used a more limited number of different words, as well as fewer and shorter T-units per utterance, which was not the case with regard to his sister. He also attrited proportionately more nouns than words from other word classes.

The subjects used at least six lexical production strategies in order to compensate for forgotten words—two of them L1-based (borrowing and foreignizing), and four of them intralingual (the use of a general word, approximation, circumlocution, and word abandonment). Their data also provided evidence of lexical retrieval processes. Examples of lexical production strategies and lexical retrieval processes are given.

From being a relatively neglected area in the study of second language learning, the acquisition of second language speech has emerged over the last decade as an important research field with a wide range of approaches; the traditions of articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguists investigation contribute a rare interdisdplinarity to this area of linguistic inquiry. Current scholarly interest augurs well for future theoretical advances.

While previous research has shown that processing instruction (PI) can more effectively facilitate the acquisition of target structures than traditional drill practice, the processing mechanism of PI has not been adequately examined because most assessment tasks have been offline. Using eye-tracking, this two-experiment study compared changes in processing patterns between two types of training: PI and traditional instruction (TI) on intermediate-level L2 learners’ acquisition of the French causative. Both experiments used a pretraining/posttraining design involving a dichotomous scene selection eye-tracking task to measure eye-movement patterns and accuracy in picture selection while participants processed auditory sentences. Neither group received explicit information (EI) in Experiment 1 while both experimental groups in Experiment 2 received EI before processing sentences. Results of Experiment 1 revealed the PI group had significantly higher accuracy scores than the TI group. A change in eye-movement pattern was also observed after training for the PI group but not for the TI group. In Experiment 2, when both groups received EI, PI subjects were again significantly more accurate than TI subjects, but both groups’ accuracy scores were not reliably higher than subjects in the PI and TI groups in Experiment 1 who did not receive EI. Eye-movement patterns in Experiment 2 showed that both TI and PI started to shift their gaze to the correct picture at the same point as PI subjects did in Experiment 1. This suggests that EI helped the TI group start entertaining the correct picture as a possible response sooner but the EI did not help the PI group process the target structure sooner than the TI group.

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages—Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)—participated. The words to be learned varied with prosodic cues: no prosody, fundamental frequency (F0) rise in initial and final position, final lengthening, and final lengthening plus F0 rise. Both listener groups performed well above chance level with the final lengthening cue, confirming its crosslinguistic use. As for final F0 rise, however, Dutch listeners did not use it until the second exposure session, whereas Korean listeners used it at initial exposure. Neither group used initial F0 rise. On the basis of these results, F0 and durational cues appear to be universal in the sense that they are used across languages for their universally applicable auditory-perceptual saliency, but how they are used is language specific and constrains the use of available prosodic cues in processing a nonnative language. A discussion on how these findings bear on theories of second language (L2) speech perception and learning is provided.

This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study in interlanguage phonology examining the production of two structures in a markedness relationship, biliteral and triliteral onsets, the latter being more marked than the former. This study specifically tests the Interlanguage Structure Conformity Hypothesis (ISCH) by measuring the acquisition of the onsets in the markedness relationship against a criterion measure of 80% correct production. The subjects were 10 native Spanish speakers enrolled in intermediate courses in a community college. Data were gathered twice over a period of 10 months. Results of the study fail to provide any counterevidence to the ISCH.

This article reports on a study exploring the differential effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of the English past tense. One hundred and forty-five seventh-grade EFL learners were assigned to four groups: Immediate CF, Delayed CF, Task Only, and Control. Each experimental group performed six focused communicative tasks, two each in three treatment sessions, eliciting the use of the English past tense. The Immediate CF group received feedback on their erroneous use of the target structure in the first session, the Delayed CF group received feedback in the final session, and the Task Only group performed the communicative tasks without receiving any feedback. The Control group only took the achievement tests. The effects of the feedback treatments were measured through an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an elicited imitation test. Mixed-effects analyses examining the influence of both fixed and random factors demonstrated that immediate CF was more facilitative of L2 development than delayed CF. The results suggest the importance of addressing linguistic errors before they are proceduralized in the interlanguage.