This study examines second (L2) and third (L3) language learners’ pitch perception. We test the hypothesis that a listener’s discrimination of and sensitivity (d’) to Japanese pitch accent reflects how pitch cues inform all words a listener knows in an additive, nonselective manner rather than how pitch cues inform words in a selective, Japanese-only manner. Six groups of listeners performed a speeded ABX discrimination task in Japanese. Groups were defined by their L1, L2, and L3 experience with the target language’s pitch cues (Japanese), a language with less informative pitch cues (English), or a language with more informative pitch cues (Mandarin Chinese). Results indicate that sensitivity to pitch is better modeled as a function of pitch’s informativeness across all languages a listener speaks. These findings support cue-centric views of perception and transfer, demonstrate potential advantageous transfer of tonal-L1/L2 speakers, and highlight the cumulative role that pitch plays in language learning.

There is currently much interest in the role of prediction in language processing, both in L1 and L2. For language acquisition researchers, this has prompted debate on the role that predictive processing may play in both L1 and L2 language learning, if any. In this conceptual review, we explore the role of prediction and prediction error as a potential learning aid. We examine different proposed prediction mechanisms and the empirical evidence for them, alongside the factors constraining prediction for both L1 and L2 speakers. We then review the evidence on the role of prediction in learning languages. We report computational modeling that underpins a number of proposals on the role of prediction in L1 and L2 learning, then lay out the empirical evidence supporting the predictions made by modeling, from research into priming and adaptation. Finally, we point out the limitations of these mechanisms in both L1 and L2 speakers.

Participants learned foreign vocabulary by means of the paired-associates learning procedure in three conditions: (a) in silence, (b) with vocal music with lyrics in a familiar language playing in the background, or (c) with vocal music with lyrics in an unfamiliar language playing in the background. The vocabulary to learn varied in concreteness (concrete vs. abstract) and phonological typicality of the foreign words’ forms (typical vs. atypical). When tested during and immediately after training, learning outcomes were poorer in the familiar language music condition than in the unfamiliar language music and silence conditions, but this effect was short-lived, as shown in a delayed test 1 week after training, on which the effect was no longer found. Learning outcomes were better for concrete words than for abstract words and better for typical foreign forms than for atypical ones. Contrary to the adverse effects of familiar language music, the effects of concreteness and typicality were lasting. We explain the interference effect in the familiar language music condition in terms of the workings of the phonological loop, a component of working memory involved in vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990).

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional allocation during target word (TW) verification (evaluation), TW episodic memory after verification, TW retention, and changes in lexical input processing. This study also addresses the relationships between inferencing and retention as well as the relationships among the various phases of lexical input processing. A questionnaire on self-reported strategy use during the TW verification task was designed to examine motivation and cognitive involvement. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Participants read narratives (one more and one less familiar) that contained nonsense words. They guessed the meanings of the TWs. After reading all of the stories, participants completed an online inference verification task whose goal was to confirm or to correct guesses and to encourage deeper processing of TWs. This was followed by a test of TW episodic memory (yes/no verification) and a strategy questionnaire. Afterward, participants completed two tests that measured receptive retention of meaning. Analyses reveal differential effects of the reader-based variables across the different aspects of lexical input processing and negative changes in lexical input processing due to an interaction between reading proficiency and background knowledge. Results illustrate how reader-based factors also affect learner involvement and lexical input processing.

The identification of stressed syllables by adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners was examined for evidence of influence of an allophonic alternation driven by word position and stress. The Spanish voiced stop-approximant alternation, whereby stops occur in stressed-syllable and word onsets, was utilized. If L2 learners track the distribution of this alternation, they should tend to link stops to stressed syllables in word-onset position and approximants to unstressed, word-medial position. Low- and high-intermediate-level first-language English learners of Spanish as well as native Spanish and monolingual English speakers listened to a series of nonce words and determined which of the two consonant-vowel (CV) syllables they perceived as stressed. In Experiment 1, onset allophone and vowel stress were crossed. In Experiment 2, the onset allophone alternated and a vowel unmarked for prominence was used. The results show that the monolingual English and low-intermediate groups were more likely to perceive syllables with stressed vowels as stressed, regardless of the allophone onset. In contrast, listeners with greater Spanish proficiency performed similarly to native Spanish speakers and were more likely to perceive stress on syllables with stop onsets, a pattern that follows the distributional information of Spanish. This finding suggests that learning the interplay between allophonic distributions and their conditioning factors is possible with experience and that knowledge of this relationship plays a role in the acquisition of L2 allophones.

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR. John R. Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 621. $29.95 paper.

This volume is not aimed at SLA researchers but is a book that SLA researchers interested in usage- and frequency-based models will find valuable. Taylor provides a lucid, comprehensive account of Langacker's theory of Cognitive Grammar (CG) and along the way also offers a thoughtful introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Of the many approaches within CL, CG has a notably wide scope and high degree of internal consistency and, thus, is particularly worthy of SLA researchers' attention. CG's central premise is that language is inherently symbolic and that linguistic expressions symbolize—or represent—conceptualization. In the original, Langacker's writing is technical and detailed, with many unfamiliar formal conventions; Taylor provides the uninitiated with a thorough, clear introduction to this significant, innovative work. SLA researchers will find it a valuable resource that provides many access points into CG and CL.

This study is the first to compare objective and subjective measures of explicit and implicit knowledge under learning from incidental exposure. An experiment was conducted, during which L1 English speakers were trained on a semiartificial language, Japlish. A measure of explicit knowledge and a recently proposed measure of implicit knowledge (i.e., an untimed auditory grammaticality judgment and a word-monitoring task) were applied to gauge the two types of knowledge at two testing sessions, and their results were compared with those of subjective measures of awareness. Results revealed clear discrepancies between the two measurement approaches in terms of their sensitivity. In particular, while the subjective measures varied in identifying explicit and implicit knowledge of various Japlish constructions, the objective measures indicated that most of the knowledge was explicit, and development of implicit knowledge (measured by the word-monitoring task) was minimal, only manifested in detecting a case-missing violation at the delayed posttest. The results are discussed with reference to the current literature on explicit and implicit learning and knowledge, and it is concluded that the criterion of (un)awareness might not be by itself sufficient to provide a full account of L2 knowledge developed under incidental conditions.

In their recent contribution on the Garden Path Technique, Tomasello and Herron (1989) suggested that the experimental results they obtained on this means of providing negative feedback lend support to a “cognitive comparison model” of second language (L2) acquisition, and they further hypothesize that it may be useful in eliminating other L2 overgeneralizations. The results Tomasello and Herron (henceforth TH) present are clearly interesting, for they appear to show that negative evidence—here, a special type of error correction—may be crucial in L2 learning. As promising as the TH results may be, however, there is reason to believe that they also should be viewed with caution. In the following, we provide some of the reasons why caution should be taken.

This article discusses the conceptualization, measurement, and validity of a recently emerged construct in the field of second language acquisition (SLA)—implicit language aptitude (alternatively “implicit aptitude”). Implicit aptitude is a set of cognitive abilities that enable learners to make unconscious computations of the distributional and transitional probabilities of linguistic input. Implicit aptitude is key to an accurate understanding of the cognitive foundation of language learning and contributes significantly to the advancement of SLA theory and pedagogy. The article starts by clarifying the concept and components of implicit aptitude, elaborating its role in SLA theories, identifying its attributes, and discussing its measurement. It then synthesizes the empirical evidence on its divergent, convergent, and predictive validity, which refers to whether it is distinct or separable from explicit aptitude, whether measures of implicit aptitude are correlated, and whether it is predictive of learning outcomes, respectively. Next, the article provides an overview of the seven empirical studies included in this special issue that examined implicit aptitude from various perspectives. The article concludes by identifying future directions.

This article reports on a study that investigated the effects of two feedback exposure conditions on the acquisition of two Turkish morphemes. The study followed a randomized experimental design with an immediate and a delayed posttest. Forty-two Chinese-speaking learners of Turkish were randomly assigned to one of three groups: receivers, nonreceivers, and control. All learners performed three communication games with a Turkish native speaker in which their errors on the Turkish plural and locative morphemes were treated according to their group assignment. The receivers’ errors were corrected through explicit correction. The nonreceivers were allowed to hear the feedback provided to the receivers; however, they did not receive feedback on their own errors. The learners in the control group neither received feedback on their own errors nor were allowed to hear the feedback other learners received. Results indicated that feedback exposure condition has an effect on the extent to which learners benefit from feedback but that this effect may be moderated by linguistic structure.

Simard and Wong (2001) raise serious concerns about the theoretical and empirical (Leow, 1998b) aspects of Tomlin and Villa's (1994) model, which postulates a fine-grained analysis of attention for SLA and the prediction that awareness at the level of detection is not crucial for further processing of second or foreign language (L2) data. According to Simard and Wong, Tomlin and Villa's frequently cited model has provided the “theoretical motivation for recent studies of input enhancement and especially of textual enhancement in SLA” (p. 104), an impact that needs to be viewed with caution (p. 105). To motivate their critique of Tomlin and Villa's model, the authors repeatedly question the validity of basing their model on “findings from the research contexts of psychology and neuroscience” (p. 105) and, in turn, put forward suggestions for a model of attention that they claim would better reflect the complex nature of SLA as well as suggestions for “new” research orientations relating to attention and awareness in SLA.

The paper begins to explore the nature of the cognitive processing involved in foreign language learning. The notion of a “discourse world” as a set of elements against the background of which a unit of talk makes sense is introduced, and the claim is made that several such “discourse worlds” may be seen to coexist in classroom discourse, in part because of participants' “awareness” (on some level) of why they are there. The notion of a discourse world is then given a psychological interpretation in terms of frame-theory, and the view is argued that the simultaneous activation of several such frames is central to the business of understanding language, and to language learning. The classroom, it is argued, offers rich opportunities for the training of such multi-level perception of foreign language input, with consequent gains in learning. From this perspective Krashen's Monitor Theory is found implausible.

The English locative alternation relates sentences of the type John loaded hay onto the wagon to those of the type John loaded the wagon with hay. Some locative verbs occur in both of these patterns, others in only one or the other. It is known that there are differences among languages with respect to which verbs are possible. The present research focuses on the constructional meaning of the locative alternation and on the constraints governing verbs that can participate in the alternation. One characteristic of the “ground-object” locative is that the object tends to be viewed as completely affected. This is known as the holism effect. Additionally, English has certain narrow constraints on the verbs that can occur in the two constructions. This study investigates whether native speakers of Korean learning English develop knowledge of the holism effect in the English locative and knowledge of the narrow constraints. English native speakers and Korean learners of English participated in a forced-choice picture-description task. Native speakers of Korean also judged an equivalent test instrument in Korean. The primary results are these: When given a ground-object structure, both learners and English native speakers preferentially chose a ground-holism picture. We interpret this as a reflection of the holism effect: Learners, like native speakers, have knowledge of this aspect of the constructional meaning of the locative. English native speakers also show their knowledge of the narrow conflation classes by rejecting ground-object structures containing verbs that are not permitted in this structure, even if the picture would be appropriate. Korean learners show no effect for narrow verb class. We interpret this as showing that the learners have not achieved native-speaker knowledge of the narrow classes. Korean uses a different basis for verb classification.

This study evaluates a working hypothesis held by a number of second-language researchers that second-language learners progress in their acquisition of target language structure by observing regularities in their input, implicitly forming hypotheses, testing those hypotheses against further input, and revising some while dropping others as a result of their fit with the input. The study considers four possible sources for variability encountered in learner language: (1) the situation(s) in which particular forms are produced; (2) the learner's encoding and decoding capabilities; (3) the target language itself, whereby systematicity at one level may leave variability at another; and (4) the analyst and procedural decisions that may effect the perception of variability. The study concludes that the analyst's task must match in complexity that of the language learner if the fullness of the learner's accomplishments is to be captured accurately.

This study considers, both transversally and longitudinally, advanced second language (L2) learners’ profile portraits, how these correlate with their sociolinguistic and linguistic performance, and how changes in these portraits over time connect to changes in sociolinguistic performance. The results show a strong correlation between high degrees of learner engagement, as captured in the profile portraits, and the three measures of sociolinguistic and linguistic performance. The longitudinal data point to an increase over time both of levels of engagement and of use of informal sociolinguistic variants. By measuring the impact of learners’ evolving engagement on their use of sociolinguistic variants as they progress to a more advanced level of proficiency in their L2, the present study shows that an index of engagement can usefully summarize the multiple effects captured by the learner profile portraits and can shed light on rates of use of certain forms.

This cross-sectional and longitudinal study sought to refine the measurement of foreign language learning boredom (FLLB) and examine its links with overall/skill-specific second and foreign language (L2) achievement (curriculum-based course exam scores) and proficiency (Cambridge English test scores). In Substudy 1, we developed and validated an 11-item Foreign Language Learning Boredom Scale–Short Form among secondary and tertiary English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in China (n1 = 2,223, n2 = 504, n3 = 934, n4 = 1,109). The scale showed sound psychometric properties (i.e., construct/criterion/convergent/discriminant/predictive validity, reliability, and measurement invariance across time and groups). In Substudy 2, structural equation modeling results show that FLLB had a consistent modest negative effect on overall and skill-specific (vocabulary and grammar, listening, reading, and writing) L2 achievement and proficiency (n4 = 1,109). Substudy 3 was a 12-month three-semester longitudinal investigation (n4 = 1,109). Cross-lagged panel modeling results show that L2 achievement predicted subsequent FLLB negatively, while FLLB did not predict subsequent L2 achievement.

An area of keen interest in applying Chomsky's UG parameter-setting model to SLA has been the Pro-Drop or Null Subject Parameter (Cyrino, 1986; Hilles, 1986; Phinney, 1987; White, 1985, 1986). However, the nature of this parameter changes dramatically from the Jaeggli (1982) and Rizzi (1982) conception with Jaeggli and Safir's (1989) proposal linking uniform morphological agreement paradigms with null subjects. Data reported here show a number of L2 learners exhibit knowledge that English is morphologically nonuniform yet still accept English null subject sentences. This is inconsistent with the predictions of the Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis and renders uncertain its applicability to SLA. The results are considered in light of a number of possible positions that can be adopted when faced with data that disconfirm a hypothesis within the UG SLA research program; it is concluded that the Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis is disconfirmed and that any reformulation of the Null Subject Parameter must take these results into consideration.

Concerns have recently been raised about the validity of scales used in the L2 motivational self system tradition, particularly in relation to sufficient discriminant validity among some of its scales. These concerns highlight the need to systematically examine the validity of scales used in this tradition. In this study, we therefore compiled a list of 18 scales in widespread use and administered them to Korean learners of English (N = 384). Testing the factorial structure of these scales using multiple exploratory and confirmatory factor-analytic criteria revealed severe discriminant validity issues. For example, the ideal L2 self was not discriminant from linguistic self-confidence, suggesting that participant responses to such ideal L2 self items is not driven by actual–ideal discrepancies as previously presumed but more likely by self-efficacy beliefs. We discuss these results in the context of the need to encourage systematic psychometric validation research in the language motivation field.

The question central to interlanguage research, and all language acquisition research, is ‘How do acquirers internalize linguistic patterns of the target language?’ Much research addressing this question is based on the hypothesis that the language of the second language acquirers represents a systematic linguistic continuum. The interlanguage hypothesis suggests two questions which are prerequisite to answering the central question cited above: 1) What are the form-function relationships of the interlanguage? and 2) How do those form-function relationships change as the acquirer revises the interlanguage?

The current paper reports on a one-year longitudinal analysis of the interlanguage of an adult acquiring English without formal instruction (Huebner 1983). It presents observations of the form-function relationships in the early interlanguage and of the ways these relationships change over the twelve months of the study.

It describes features of the early interlanguage related to presupposed-asserted information, topic-comment organization of information, and referentiality, which express both pragmatic/discourse functions and semantico-grammatical case functions (Pfaff 1982) in the interlanguage, and examines the changing functions of these forms with attention to the role of set phrases, quasi-spontaneous speech, and processes of neutralization in the changing interlanguage system. The paper concludes by proposing two ways in which hypotheses may be neutralized and speculates that these two processes are reciprocally linked.