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.

Referential expressions (REs) have been investigated in L2 English but to date there is no single study that systematically and simultaneously analyzes the development and acquisition of the multiple factors that constrain the choice of REs in natural discourse production. We investigate L1 Spanish–L2 English learners across three proficiency levels versus an English control group from the COREFL corpus. An analysis of both the RE and its antecedent(s) reveals that different intra- and extralinguistic factors constrain the choice of REs (information status, activated antecedents, syntactic configurations, characterhood, within-task effect, and proficiency level). L2 learners (L2ers) are sensitive to some factors but are unable to fully attain native-like levels even at advanced stages. They do not transfer null subjects from their L1 contrary to previous L2 research, and do not find all contexts at the syntax-discourse interface equally problematic, thus confirming previous theoretical proposals and empirical findings.

This paper focuses on the process of Japanese learners' acquisition ofthe locality requirement of English reflexives. Previous studies seem to agree that the initial hypothesis of learners is an overgeneral one that allows nonlocal binding. Research findings diverge, however, as to whether or not learners can approximate the target grammar without the help of negativeevidence as their overall proficiency in English increases. This paper provides evidence of a successful retreat from the initial overgeneral hypothesis. In an attempt to explain the observed progress, it is suggested that a nonsyntactic aspect of language plays a role here, that is, viewpoint in sentence processing. This notion may help us to specify the type of evidence that can trigger learners' progress in the acquisition of the English reflexive.

This paper reports on the reanalysis of Suzuki’s (2017) experiment and investigated the extent to which learning schedules influence automatization of second language (L2) morphology. Sixty participants were separated into two groups, which studied morphological rules for oral production under short-spacing (3.3-day intervals) and long-spacing learning conditions (7-day intervals). Their oral production test performance resulted in two measures of automatization: reaction time (RT) as an index of speedup and coefficient of variance (CV) as an index of stability/restructuring. The results showed that, while RT of both groups declined significantly after the training, the 3.3-day group exhibited greater propensity for restructuring than the 7-day group. Furthermore, procedural learning ability measured by the Tower of London task was significantly associated with RT, but not with CV, in the 3.3-day group only. These findings suggest that learning schedules and procedural learning ability influence different stages of automatization of L2 morphological learning.

Pinker and Prince (1988) argued that two dissociable systems underlie the development of linguistic representations: one rule governed and the other associative. These two dissociable systems of representation and processing are claimed to be a linguistic universal (Pinker, 1999). Therefore, one should expect that nonnative speakers of a language also manifest the same kinds of dissociations in performance between rule-based and associative features of language as native speakers. The study reported here extends the work of Prasada and Pinker (1993) into the second language (L2) domain to test whether nonnative speakers (a) perform similarly to native speakers and (b) dissociate rule-based from associative features of language. In Prasada and Pinker, the degree of similarity between a nonce verb and a real English verb influenced past-tense generalizations on nonce irregular verbs but did not influence generalizations on nonce regular verbs. In the experiment reported here, first language (L1) and L2 participants of different ages and language groups were compared on the same task as that used by Prasada and Pinker. Participants overall produced more verbs with a past-tense suffix for nonce regular items than for the nonce irregular items. Significant group effects indicate that participants' varying levels of experience with English play an important role in their past-tense productions of nonce verbs. Furthermore, similarity influenced both the regular and irregular verbs on a production task. These results are discussed in terms of whether there are two dissociable systems underlying L2 linguistic knowledge and whether an alternative single associative learning mechanism could be responsible for the development of the system of regular and irregular inflectional morphology in both L1 and L2 learning.This research was partly funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant (no. 752-94-1808). I appreciate the help of Jennifer Graham in collecting the data and am grateful to Nick Ellis, Nina Spada, Lydia White, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

The present study investigated the retention of school-learned French language skills in Dutch students across a period of 4 years following the training period. Two training levels were investigated: 4 and 6 years of French training. The skills tested were all receptive: general receptive proficiency; listening and reading comprehension; and receptive phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills. In addition, self-assessment measures were administered.

The results indicated that global skills improved, if anything, and that only lexical and, particularly, grammatical skills “attrited” during the period investigated. On the other hand, subjects' self-perception of their retention was much more negative.

To test the effects of talker variability and explicit instruction on the statistical learning of lexical tone, 80 monolingual English listeners were taught an artificial language that mimicked Mandarin’s asymmetric distribution of syllable-tone co-occurrences. Training stimuli consisted of either speech from one talker or speech from four talkers. Participants were either never instructed or explicitly taught associations between phonemes (CVs), tones, and nonce symbols across four consecutive days. Learning was assessed by the accuracy of mouse clicks and eye movements to visual nonce symbols. Critical trials induced competition between the target symbol, which matched the acoustic input, and a competitor symbol that had a statistically more probable tone (but mismatched the acoustic input). Eye fixations indicated that participants were sensitive to syllable-tone co-occurrence probabilities even without explicit instruction of tone. The degree to which statistical knowledge was used to recognize words appeared to increase when participants processed more variable speech.

Although recent research suggests that gains are made in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad, the few studies that have been conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts have focused primarily on features characteristic of Spain. This article examines the L2 acquisition of phonological features characteristic of Buenos Aires Spanish, [ʃ] and [ʒ], known as sheísmo/zheísmo, for example the pronunciation of llave [ʝaβe] “key” as [ʃaβe] or [ʒaβe]. Participants include 23 learners of Spanish studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More than 4,800 tokens were gathered before, during, and at the end of the semester using sociolinguistic interviews, a reading passage, and a word list. These data were analyzed for the influence of linguistic and social factors using mixed-effects logistic regression (Rbrul; Johnson, 2009). Results suggest that participants approximate nativelike norms of use of these features and that time in country is a statistically significant predictor of patterns of phonological variation.

Although previous work has analyzed the communication strategies (CS) of L2 learners (e.g., Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Tarone, 1980, 1977), this research is an attempt at studying CS used by both 12 speakers and their interviewers during a videotaped interview. Fifty-three beginning French learners were interviewed and the videotape was analyzed for CS used by both interactants; learners' performance was also rated (ACTFL, 1982). Subjects were instructed either by Total Physical Response (Asher, 1977, 1969) or Strategic Interaction (SI) (Di Pietro, 1982, 1979).

Data were subjected to correlational and MANOVA analyses. Significant differences were detected between groups. In general, the higher the proficiency rating, the lower was the use of CS. The method of instruction appeared to have an important bearing on amount and kind of CS used and on proficiency ratings received. SI students and their interviewers used fewer CS; SI learners also received higher ratings.

It appears that SI facilitated students' development of at least two underlying competencies, linguistic and interactional (Palmer, 1979; Canale & Swain, 1980). It is also posited that SI students' diminished use of CS indicates a higher degree of control over the activity, as proposed by the Vygotskian paradigm (Vygotsky, 1962).

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers’ sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in English by L1 Mandarin participants using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and focused on the use of quantificational cues to noun number and their interaction with agreement morphology on the verb. Previous work in English monolinguals has shown that agreement violations elicited larger P600s when preceded by a plurally quantified subject noun phrase (NP) compared to an unquantified NP. In the present study, Mandarin speakers were tested on the same quantified and unquantified sentences (e.g., Most/The cookies taste/*tastes…) as in the prior work. Like the L1 English speakers, ERPs time-locked to the verb showed a reliable P600 in response to agreement violations. However, the P600 in Mandarin speakers was larger for ungrammatical verbs with unquantified subjects, a contrast with English monolinguals. First, these results demonstrate that L2 agreement violations can elicit qualitatively similar neural responses in L1 Mandarin speakers as in English monolinguals (P600 effects), a finding that is to our knowledge novel. Second, quantification modulated the P600 in the L2 speakers in a qualitatively different way than in natives. Overall, these findings suggest stronger reliance on lexical versus morphological cues to number in Mandarin speakers, and that this impacts anticipation of subsequent grammatical features.

This study examines the associations between implicit and explicit language aptitude and the effects of the timing of corrective feedback (CF). A total of 112 seventh-grade EFL learners were assigned to three groups: Immediate CF, Delayed CF, and Task Only. The three groups underwent three treatment sessions during which they performed six focused communicative tasks eliciting the use of the English past tense. The Immediate and Delayed CF groups received CF treatments in the first and final sessions, respectively, and the Task Only group performed the communicative tasks without receiving any feedback. Treatment effects were measured through an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an elicited imitation test. Implicit language aptitude was operationalized as procedural memory and explicit language aptitude as working memory and declarative memory. Multiple regression analysis showed that procedural memory was significantly predictive of the effectiveness of Immediate CF, declarative memory was significantly associated with Delayed CF and Task Only, and working memory was a significant predictor of Immediate CF and Delayed CF. The results were interpreted by consulting the methodological features of the treatments and the mechanisms of the three cognitive abilities.

The present study examined whether Chinese-English bilinguals showed morphological sensitivity toward prefixed words. In the experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects in a Transparent condition (disagree-AGREE) and an Opaque condition (mischief-CHIEF), but not in a Form condition (stranger-ANGER). In contrast, bilinguals showed equivalent priming effects across the three conditions. Indeed, the difference between the magnitude of priming in the Form condition relative to that in the other two conditions was statistically smaller for the bilinguals than for the monolinguals. These findings suggest Chinese-English bilinguals are less sensitive to the morphological status of prefixes, compared with monolinguals.

To probe the limits of attention raising through form-focused instruction, second-language research must adapt to the needs of a technologically driven learning environment. In this study, we used a randomized control design to investigate the effect of captioned media on the learning of vocabulary and grammar in L2 Spanish (n = 369 learners). Through four data-collection sessions, participants were presented with a grammar-lesson video and a multimodal video with one of three captioning formats: textually enhanced target vocabulary, textually enhanced target grammar, or no captioning. Results show strong immediate effects of captioning on target vocabulary, with additional effects of captioning on some, but not all, target-grammar structures. The findings demonstrate that (a) the learning of some grammatical structures is more conducive to captioning than others, and (b) there is space for future investigation into the factors that may influence the effectiveness of multimodal interventions, such as prior knowledge or frequency of use.

This study investigated the effect of the first language (L1) on the visual word recognition of inflected nouns in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Case inflection is common in Russian and in Finnish but nonexistent in Chinese. Several models have been posited to describe L2 morphological processing. The unified competition model (UCM; MacWhinney, 2005) predicts L1-L2 transfer, whereas processability theory (Pienemann, 1998) posits a universal hierarchy in L2 acquisition regardless of the L1. The morphological decomposition deficiency hypothesis (Ullman, 2001b; VanPatten, 2004) claims that nonnatives cannot morphologically decompose words. Finally, DeKeyser (2005) proposes that morphophonological transparency affects nonnative processing. The current study explores which model best accounts for the processing of L2 Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. The materials included simple nouns, transparently inflected nouns, and semitransparently inflected nouns. The results showed that Finns and Russians had longer reaction times (RTs) for morphologically complex nouns, but Chinese had longer RTs for semitransparent nouns. The RT results support the UCM by showing a L1-L2 transfer. Furthermore, transparency influenced word recognition among nonnatives; they made the most errors with semitransparent nouns.

Donald (2001) argued that mimesis is fundamental to communication and culture. The basic level of mimetic action is mime—as found, for example, in the imaginative, expressive play of children, who typically imitate aspects of the world around them, including the actions of their parents, and pretend to be those they will become. Mimesis has a prominent position in the lives of children in relation to language acquisition as well; for example, Nelson (1996) found that mimetic portrayals of events, such as in play, largely precede language and are key to its development. According to Donald, mimesis is also central to tribal identity (culture), in how emotions are expressed and understood. This article argues that mimesis plays two prominent roles in acquiring another language. The first relates to how people materialize aspects of their second language discourse through gesture as a means of making meaning for themselves as well as for interlocutors. This perspective is grounded in the Vygotskian branch of Soviet psychology, particularly the work of Gal'perin (1989). The so-called tribal aspect of mimesis (identity) in the form of gesture is also taken up in relation to SLA, again from a sociocultural perspective. Overall, it is argued that our material being impacts the way we live and learn and that sound theories of SLA will need to take this into account.

Comprehensibility, or ease of understanding, has emerged as an important construct in second language (L2) speech research. Many studies have examined the linguistic features that underlie this construct, but there has been limited work on behavioral and affective predictors. The goal of this study was therefore to examine the extent to which anxiety and collaborativeness predict interlocutors’ perception of one another’s comprehensibility. Twenty dyads of L2 English speakers completed three interactive tasks. Throughout their 17-minute interaction, they were periodically asked to evaluate their own and each other’s anxiety and collaborativeness and to rate their partner’s comprehensibility using 100-point scales. Mixed-effects models showed that partner anxiety and collaborativeness predicted comprehensibility, but the relative importance of each predictor depended on the nature of the task. Self-collaborativeness was also related to comprehensibility. These findings suggest that comprehensibility is sensitive to a range of linguistic, behavioral, and affective influences.

This quasi-experimental study explores the effects of three types of instruction (form-based, meaning-based, and form- plus meaning-based) on the learning of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) and postsecondary Japanese as a foreign language learners' ability to generalize different types of relativization, examined in comparison to the predictions of Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH). The study investigated whether instruction focused on a marked relativization type could facilitate the learning of other types. Results of comprehension and sentence-combination pretests and posttests showed that although the scores of all three groups increased, the form-based group outperformed the other two groups on both tests. Whereas the comprehension pretest results did not reflect the predictions of the NPAH, participants were able to generalize rules for other relativization types. This study suggests that learners' attention to detailed analysis of form facilitates the learning of RCs in this context, and that the teaching of marked items might inform effective syllabus development in second language relativization.I would like to thank Yasuhiro Shirai for giving me an opportunity to present this paper at the workshop on the SLA of relative clauses held at Cornell University on January 28, 2006. I greatly appreciate the insightful feedback that I received from the participants of the workshop (in particular, Stephen Matthews, James Mitchell, and Hiromi Ozeki) as well as the two anonymous SSLA reviewers, and Kiyoko Toratani, my colleague at York University. This paper is part of my doctoral dissertation to be submitted to the University of Toronto, and I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Sharon Lapkin, as well as my thesis committee members, Nina Spada, Eunice Jang, and Yuki Johnson, for their continuous support and encouragement. I am also grateful to my former students in the Japanese course for agreeing to participate in this study.

The purpose of this study is to begin work toward a grammatical assessment measure that could bridge the gap between theoretical work on grammatical development, on the one hand, and tools such as the Michigan Test (which uses multiple-choice questions on vocabulary and grammar) or the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages scale (which uses holistic descriptions of grammar use), on the other hand. Such a measure would need to be practical to administer with large groups. Two proposals of grammatical development (processability theory, Pienemann, 1998, 2005; and organic grammar, Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 2006) were applied to short samples of spontaneous production data from 48 adult second-language learners of English from mixed first-language backgrounds. The rapid profile scale successfully accounted for the learners’ development but is of somewhat limited use with short samples of data. The organic grammar placement scale may need to be further refined, but it includes important indicators of grammatical development. A preliminary proposal for using a combined measure with a rubric is presented.

This article describes the undirected learning (learning without explicit teaching) of tense markers in German by Spanish migrant workers. It will be shown that the remarkable differences the informants displayed in expressing the concept of tense are a function of the daily communicative routines which they developed in order to meet their communicative needs and demands. By examining very simplified learner varieties, I will demonstrate that a traditional grammatical analysis of tense is not capable of accounting for the wide range of expressions for temporal relations which were produced in an elicited Spanish-German translation task.