Although wh-words generally stay in situ in Chinese wh-questions, they can be topicalized. However, the wh-topicalization is determined at the syntax-discourse interface and has to be governed by discourse conditions; only discourse-linked (D-linked) wh-words can be topicalized, but non-D-linked ones cannot. This article reports on an empirical study that investigated English speakers’ second language (L2) acquisition of Chinese wh-topicalization. The results of an acceptability judgment test indicate that advanced English speakers are sensitive to the discourse condition that governs the syntactic derivation of wh-topicalization in Chinese, as they were found to be able to make the distinction in their L2 Chinese by allowing D-linked, but not non-D-linked, wh-elements to topicalize. However, these results also indicate that wh-determiner phrases (DPs) and wh-noun phrases (NPs) differ in their sensitivity to presupposition background information in L2 Chinese wh-topicalization, and it is argued that the availability of the deictic feature in the wh-element involved is a variable affecting the D-linking properties of wh-elements in the development of L2 Chinese wh-topicalization, and this seems more likely to be a representational deficit than a processing problem.

Elicited imitation (EI), a short-cut measure of global proficiency in second language (L2) research, requires participants to listen to sentences and repeat them as closely as possible. To support instrument sharing and assessment of L2 proficiency for longitudinal and crosslinguistic research, we created a parallel form of an EI task (EIT) for L2 English originally developed by the third author and colleagues and investigated the reliability and validity of the original and new forms. Eighty-two participants completed the two EITs, an oral narrative task, and a self-diagnostic survey. Both forms exhibited high reliability and good alignment with external criterion measures. Both distinguished well among four proficiency levels in the sample. Further, participants’ perception of EI difficulty aligned well with their EI scores. We suggest some improvements to boost forms equivalence and discuss new insights about the nature of EI as reconstructive, integrative, modality independent, and with indirect links to communicative abilities. Our study seeks to make this English EIT instrument widely useful to the L2 research community.

There has been a growing interest in the study of writing from the perspective of its potential contribution to language development. However, scant attention has been paid to key methodological considerations regarding the analysis of the connection between L2 writing processes, reflection on language while writing, and language learning. In an attempt to advance in this domain, and informed by models of L2 writing, and cognitive L2 writing research framed in the problem-solving paradigm, this study provides a comprehensive description of the language reflection individual writers engage in when solving the linguistic problems they face while completing writing tasks in their L2. The think-aloud protocols generated by 21 EFL learners while writing an individual argumentative essay were analyzed on the basis of a reconceptualization of language-related episodes as problem-solving strategy clusters. The result is a comprehensive, theoretically motivated, and empirically based coding system that is offered as a basis for future research in the domain. We discuss the methodological implications of our analytic approach and advance some theoretical implications for future debates on the language learning potential of individual writing tasks.

Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a self-paced reading experiment confirmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 proficiency.

This paper reports on an experimental study that investigates the acquisition of Japanese unaccusative verbs by English-speaking learners. Following Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), it is assumed that unaccusativity is syntactically represented but semantically determined. The experiment is devised specifically to examine whether L2 learners are sensitive to syntactic and semantic properties associated with unaccusative verbs in Japanese, which contrast with the properties of unergative verbs. In particular, the experiment involved picture tasks with two structures: the takusan construction as a syntactic test and the -teiru construction as a semantic test. Overall results of the experiment show that L2 learners generally know the properties investigated; that is, that subjects of unaccusative verbs originate in object position, and semantic notions such as telicity and change of state are aspects of meaning relevant to the classification of unaccusativity in Japanese. Based on these results, it is argued that the mapping of verb arguments to syntactic positions is not random, but rule governed, for most of the L2 learners in the present study.

This article reports the findings of a study in which transfer of verb properties was investigated via syntactic data elicited from second language (L2) learners. It was hypothesized that a learner's first language (L1) would influence the acquisition of verbs in those L2 semantic classes where so-called L1-L2 translation equivalents could be found. To investigate lexical transfer, the performance of Hindi-Urdu speakers on tests of English causatives was compared with that of Vietnamese speakers, because there are significant differences between causativization patterns in Hindi-Urdu and Vietnamese. To account for proficiency-based variation in performance, learners were placed in one of three levels of lexical proficiency in English, and Mann-Whitney comparisons were made between Hindi-Urdu and Vietnamese speakers at corresponding proficiency levels. It was found that the performance of the Hindi-Urdu and Vietnamese groups differed significantly in several semantic contexts. Generally, the results suggest that there is some transfer of semantic information from the L1 verb lexicon to the emerging L2 verb lexicon. More specifically, the findings suggest that verb properties are transferred selectively and that transfer plays a role in the difficulty or ease involved in the shedding of overgeneralized lexical rules.

This article presents an experimental study investigating the compounding parameter in the L2 Spanish interlanguage of English and French NSs in light of the Subset Principle and its predictions for the process of L2 development. The compounding parameter (Snyder, 1995, 2001) argues that languages permit complex predicate constructions like verb particles, resultatives, and double objects if and only if they can productively form N-N compounds. English exhibits the plus value of the parameter, allowing N-N compounds and the related constructions, whereas in Spanish and French these compounds and constructions are ungrammatical. Because English also allows periphrastic constructions of the same meaning, which are the only option in French and Spanish, English represents the superset parameter value to the Spanish and French subset value. At issue is whether L2 learners are able to acquire the subset value of the compounding parameter based on the naturalistic input they receive. In this case, the learning task involves realizing that some L1 constructions are unavailable in the L2. Results indicate that the learners initially transfer the L1 (superset) value and do not start with the subset value of the parameter. Findings also inform the debate on whether negative evidence can engage UG-related acquisition. Ten of the 26 advanced subjects were able to successfully reset the whole parameter based on negative data for only two of the four constructions in the cluster. This fact suggests that it is not impossible for negative evidence to be utilized in grammar reorganization.

Research in first language and second language (L2) comprehension has demonstrated that both learner and input variables contribute to the ease with which a message is understood. Questions remain, however, as to how these variables affect the way L2 learners process linguistic form during comprehension. This study examines how one learner variable (topic familiarity) and two input variables (mode and pausing) affect learners' comprehension and their processing of a new morphological form (the Spanish future tense) in the input. Two hundred sixty-six participants in an accelerated beginning Spanish course either read or listened to a short narrative in Spanish on either a familiar topic or an unfamiliar one. Additionally, half of the listening groups encountered 3-second pauses between each sentence. After listening to or reading the passages, the participants performed two comprehension tasks (recall protocol and multiple-choice test) and two form-assessment tasks (form-recognition task and tense identification/translation). The results revealed that, although all three variables affected learners' comprehension, only mode affected learners' processing future tense morphology.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition held in Chicago in February, 2002. This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am extremely grateful to Bill VanPatten for his guidance during the entire process of the research project as well as to James F. Lee, Diane Musumeci, Alice Omaggio Hadley, and Anna María Escobar for their feedback and encouragement. I also wish to thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their insightful and critical comments. All errors and omissions are, of course, my own.

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. The current work investigates this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on L2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Existing literature suggests that speaker variability benefits L2 vocabulary learning in adults, but this may not be the case for younger learners. In this study native English-speaking adults, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 10- to 11-year-olds learned six novel Lithuanian words from a single speaker, and six from eight speakers. In line with previous research, adults showed better production of the multispeaker items at test. No such benefit was found for either group of children, either in production or comprehension. Children also had greater difficulties in processing multiple-speaker cues during training. We conclude that age-related capacity limitations may constrain the ability to utilize speaker variability when learning words in a new language.

Nick Ellis's article is impressive for its breadth of scholarship and the cogent case made for frequency as an important factor in second language acquisition (SLA). This response begins with a brief historical sketch, which aims to contextualize the frequency factor in terms of the evolution of SLA research. Although researchers have known about a frequency effect for some time, until recently, we have lacked neurologically plausible models and technologically convenient means of measuring and testing frequency effects in input. Still, as relevant and important as a frequency factor is, it requires greater definition and qualification. For instance, L2 learners are agents of their own learning process. They do not merely record frequency; they categorize frequently occurring patterns, abstract, and generalize from them. Higher level generalizations emerge from interactions, impose top-down expectancies on future data, and, in turn, are altered by the data in a perpetually dynamic interplay. In a similar fashion, it is incumbent on SLA researchers not to be satisfied with a frequency explanation, but to interpret it—in short, to make sense of frequency.

With Russian as the target language, a proof of concept study was undertaken to determine whether it is possible to identify linguistic features, control over which is implicated in progress on the Interagency Linguistic Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale, thereby better to inform the instructional process. Following its development in an instrumentation study, a revised version of a computer-delivered battery of 33 perception and production tasks was administered to 68 participants—57 learners between levels 2 and 3 (21 at ILR 2, 18 at 2+, and 18 at 3) on the ILR scale, and 11 native speaker controls—whose proficiency was tested via an ILR oral proficiency telephone interview. The tasks sampled subjects’ control of Russian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and collocations. Relationships between control of the linguistic features and the ILR levels of interest were assessed statistically. All 33 tasks, 18 of which assessed learners’ abilities in perception and 15 of which assessed their abilities in production, were found to differentiate ILR proficiency levels 2 and 3, and a subset was found to also distinguish levels 2 and 2+, and 2+ and 3. On the basis of the results, a checklist of linguistic features pegged to proficiency levels was produced that can be useful for syllabus designers, teachers, and learners themselves as well as providing the basis for future diagnostic tests.

A number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word tokens. The study also controlled for individual differences such as first language distance, English proficiency, gender, and age. Results demonstrated that lower level L2 learners produced more infrequent tokens at the beginning of the study and that high intermediate learners, when compared to advanced learners, produced more infrequent tokens at the beginning of the study and more frequent tokens toward the end of the study. Main effects were also reported for proficiency level, age, and language distance. These results provide further evidence that L2 production may not follow expected frequency trends (i.e., that more infrequent tokens are produced as a function of time).

The present study examined second language (L2) development in the perceptual identification of a dialectal sound of the target language, through an investigation of the role of individual learner experiences in L2 phonological development. A total of 213 English-speaking learners of Spanish across five levels of study and with varying dialect contact experiences completed an identification task, which tested perceptual categorization of Spanish dialectal aspirated-s (e.g., siesta [ˈsi̯eh-ta]). In accordance with postulates of L2 speech perception models (PAM-L2, SLM, L2LP), findings revealed influence of the first language phonology on categorization at early levels shifting toward nativelike, dialect-specific categorizations of aspirated-s for more experienced learners. Dialect contact factors of prior study abroad location, native speaker social contacts, and metalinguistic training were found to be predictors of the dialectal perceptual targets toward which the L2 learners developed—for those learners past intermediate-level language courses—highlighting how individual experiences shape L2 perceptual abilities.

Recently researchers have suggested that syntactic priming may facilitate the production of wh-questions with obligatory auxiliary verbs, particularly when learners are prompted to produce those questions with a wide variety of lexical items (McDonough & Kim, 2009; McDonough & Mackey, 2008). However, learners’ ability to benefit from syntactic priming materials with prompt-type frequency may be mediated by their ability to recognize patterns in aural input. The purpose of this replication study is to confirm the positive impact of prompt-type frequency on learners’ production of wh-questions reported by McDonough and Kim (2009), and to investigate whether its impact is mediated by learners’ auditory pattern-discrimination abilities. Thai learners (n = 43) of English as a foreign language (EFL) carried out three oral tests, two sets of syntactic priming activities, and an auditory pattern-discrimination test over a 4-week period. Half of the learners carried out the syntactic priming activities with low-type-frequency prompts, whereas the other learners received high-type-frequency prompts. The results revealed a significant interaction between Type Frequency × Auditory Pattern Discrimination on the immediate and delayed posttests. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential role of individual cognitive factors in mediating the relationship between syntactic priming and second language (L2) development.

This study examines how Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) intersects with the typological characteristics of Korean in the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs). Korean has two types of RC constructions: head-external and head-internal. The head-external relative has its head to the right of the RC, whereas the head-internal relative has its lexical head in the RC and is marked by the complementizer kes. In first language development, it has been observed the head-internal type emerges earlier than the head-external type. The current study investigates how the use of the two types of RCs interacts with the NPAH, with a focus on subject (SU) and direct object (DO) RCs in Korean second language development. Oral production data were collected from 40 learners of Korean as a foreign language. The results showed that there was an advantage for SU over DO in the head-external RC and that the head-external construction was preceded by headless and head-internal constructions. The results suggest that a head-external RC in Korean involves the syntactic mechanism of linking the head and the gap relation, whereas this might not be the case for a head-internal RC.The authors would like to thank Yasuhiro Shirai, Stephen Matthews, Virginia Yip, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable input and feedback on this paper. Any errors, of course, are our own.

The present study compares native and nonnative processing of Spanish active and passive sentences. The nonnative speakers were tested before and after receiving processing instruction on the Spanish passive. The native speakers were tested once and provide a baseline for comparisons. We measured accuracy and response time to select the correct response in a paired picture matching task. We used eye-tracking measures to capture processing behaviors on both active and passive verb forms. We measured processing using time to first fixation on the verb area of interest, mean first fixation duration, mean first pass time, and mean second pass time. The results revealed that processing passive sentences comes at a cost to both native and nonnative speakers. After instruction the nonnative speakers showed no significant differences with native speakers in accuracy and response time. Also, the nonnative speakers’ processing behaviors became more nativelike but did not reach the native speaker level.

In comparative studies focusing on context of learning, the main contexts under investigation have been study abroad (SA), at-home formal instruction (AH), and domestic immersion (IM). With the global status of English and its burgeoning popularity as a medium of instruction in countries where English only holds the status of a lingua franca, a new SA context has emerged. This study compares the L2 learning of English in this new English as a lingua franca study abroad (ELFSA) context to Anglophone SA and AH in terms of oral and written complexity, accuracy, and fluency gains. Participants’ perceptions of contextual differences concerning the amount of language contact, use, development, and their views toward English are also explored qualitatively. Apart from indicating equal development on most CAF measures after a semester, the qualitative findings highlight ELFSA as providing a low-anxiety atmosphere that helps sojourners gain ownership of English. Thus, ELFSA emerges as an appealing study abroad context for future sojourners.

This paper compares the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of ESL. Fifteen native speakers and thirty-five advanced learners produced on-line (play-by-play) descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. A methodology for the quantitative analysis of discourse production is described which permits the explicit identification of foreground-background information and its interaction with both native speaker and interlanguage syntaxes. Results show that: (1) Native speakers and learners exhibit one universal discourse strategy in retreating to a more pragmatic mode of communication under the severe communicative stress of on-line description, as revealed through the systematic loss of the coding relations ordinarily holding between foreground-background information and clause independence/tense-aspect; (2) Learners also exhibit a learner-specific general communication strategy in which significant events are described but nonsignificant events avoided.

In traditional classifications of languages by inflectional subsystems, both creole languages and the results of untutored SLA (interlanguages) are classified as isolating. We focus on remnants of verbal inflectional morphology in French-related creoles and ask: (a) Can the properties of verbal morphology be attributed to SLA, and (b) what does this imply for creole genesis? We show how acquisition of inflectional morphology occurs in learner varieties of French from a basic variety perspective. We discuss reflexes of French inflectional morphology that survived the creolization process, resulting in a long–short opposition of verb forms: Across creoles, different grammatical properties are marked by this opposition. Finally, we consider the implications for creole genesis theories and propose a three-generational scenario of creolization with multiple agents.

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between CHL learners and non-CHL learners. Sixty-two collegiate intermediate-level Chinese learners including 37 CHL learners and 25 non-CHL learners participated in this study. Drawing on multivariate analyses, the study found that CHL learners outperformed non-CHL learners on oral vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, but not on print vocabulary knowledge. In both groups of learners, print vocabulary knowledge was the strongest predictor of lexical inferencing ability. While oral vocabulary knowledge and print vocabulary knowledge were highly correlated in non-CHL learners, they were more distinct constructs in CHL learners. These findings seem to suggest that early exposure to spoken Chinese enhances the development of oral vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in CHL learners. Importantly, the latter appears to enhance the formation of the connection between oral vocabulary knowledge and print knowledge.