This paper is in answer to Ellis's (1994) call for more research about vocabulary acquisition from oral input in four areas. It is a hypothesis-generating study of nine advanced university EFL learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition from oral and written dialogue journals over a semester's time. All teacher and student entries in the two types of journals were transcribed and analyzed using WordCruncher (1993). The analyses compare the characteristics of the input to the learners in the two modes as well as quantitative and qualitative evidence of vocabulary acquisition by the learners from the two modes. Findings of this study indicate several specific places (14 statements) where further research could be undertaken. These fit in three of the areas Ellis named for exploration: (a) “the nature of the input,” (b) “the role of interaction,” and (c) “individual learner factors” (p. 1). The findings suggest measures that can be used for quantitative and qualitative evidence of vocabulary acquisition from natural sources

The present study examines classroom learners' course of grammatical development in acquiring the interpretive correlates of variable adjective position in French. Eventual attainment of the target language system requires not only knowledge of linear word-order possibilities within the determiner phrase that differ from their native language (English) but knowledge of the interpretive differences between the two orders as well. Results from a contextualized acceptability judgment task administered to monolingual English-speaker controls, four groups of university-level learners of French, and native-French-speaker controls (N = 157) show that adjective position-interpretation pairings are eventually acquired, although with a high degree of between-learner variability in rate. Based on an analysis of both individual and group acceptance rates, I argue that eventual attainment of the second language system requires a priori knowledge of a specific representational format—supporting the notion of the domain-specificity of language as pursued in generative accounts of SLA—but that the course of grammatical development is affected by a number of group- and learner-specific variables that mediate depth of processing (following Gass, 1997).I am indebted to a number of individuals who helped me bring this manuscript to publication, including Laurent Dekydtspotter, the director of my 2002 dissertation at Indiana University, where the research presented in this manuscript was begun; several anonymous SSLA reviewers, who provided insightful and constructively critical comments; and the editorial staff of SSLA, who provided much encouragement and showed great patience.

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.

Learners must develop the ability to vary language according to linguistic and situational factors to produce context-appropriate utterances. Likewise, interpreting the additional meaning conveyed through language variation is essential for successful communication. Nevertheless, research on the interpretation of the variable copulas in Spanish is scarce and we do not know how individual lexical items and patterns of co-occurrence of adjectives with particular copulas influence interpretation. Addressing this void, we compare interpretation of the copulas by native speakers and highly advanced, advanced, and intermediate learners. Participants completed an interpretation task containing the copulas paired with one of nine adjectives, categorized as typically co-occurring with ser, estar, or both copulas. The current study contributes to the body of work on communicative competence and advanced L2 proficiency by exploring the development of interpretative abilities of English-speaking learners of Spanish and the extent to which interpretation differs across adjective classes and individual adjectives.

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 article comprises two parts. The first part is a critique of R. Ellis's (2005) psychometric study, which attempted to use an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to establish operationalizations of the constructs of explicit and implicit knowledge. I argue that the choice of an EFA in this endeavor is misguided and that a confirmatory factor analysis should have been employed. Additionally, the specific execution of the EFA is criticized on a number of fronts. The major claim of the critique is that R. Ellis's study does not successfully demonstrate that his operationalizations are reducible to the two factors of implicit and explicit knowledge. The second part of this article goes on to make some methodological recommendations for future research in this area. Finally, the potential of structural equation modeling is pointed out as a response to Hulstijn's (2005) warning concerning the pitfalls of extreme rationalism and extreme empiricism within the future research trajectory of explicit and implicit knowledge.

This study investigated the potential of phonetic symbols and keywords as response labels for perceptual training of L2 sounds. Seventy-one Spanish learners of English were assigned to three groups: symbols, keywords, and control. Students in the symbols and keywords groups followed a 4-week High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) program based on identification tasks. The target aspects addressed were eight English vowels that tend to be problematic for Spanish EFL learners (/iː ɪ æ ʌ ɜː e ɒ ɔː/). Training stimuli consisted of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonwords featuring these vowels on a range of phonetic contexts. Overall, the results revealed significant differences between the perception gains made by the two experimental groups, which performed similarly, and the control group. Both experimental groups were able to transfer gains to untrained nonwords, and to untrained voices. Moreover, gains were maintained over time. Improvements were also made in real words, especially by the symbols group, although no significant differences were found between groups. The results suggest that both phonetic symbols and keywords are effective labels for perceptual training and the creation/consolidation of perceptual sound categories. The study offers further evidence of the effectiveness of HVPT for pronunciation training as well as implications for perceptual training studies and language teaching.

A consistent finding in second language acquisition research has been that in the early stages of acquisition learners often receive simplified input. This finding has led researchers to question whether or not simplified input has a facilitative effect on the acquisition process. This study examines the effects of simplified input in early L2 acquisition by experimentally manipulating language input to two groups of learners and then assessing their acquisition longitudinally within a controlled laboratory setting. The impetus for the study described here was Givón's (1990) competition hypothesis that posits that, in early L2 acquisition, vocabulary and grammar compete for memory, attention, and processing capacity. Because one can communicate with vocabulary in absence of grammar but not vice versa, it was proposed that learners receiving pidgin input would acquire vocabulary more efficiently than learners challenged with the dual task of acquiring vocabulary and grammar simultaneously. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that once vocabulary processing skills were automated, learners would acquire grammar more rapidly. Results of a variety of measures reveal that the dual task of acquiring vocabulary and grammar does not hinder either and that the longer the exposure to grammatical input the greater the advantage in real-time grammar processing abilities. Converging evidence from all measures of language learning provides strong support for the usefulness and viability of laboratory study of SLA.

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.

This study examined individual-level variability in N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native and nonnative language sentence processing of semantic and grammar information. Twenty-six native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language were tested. Participants completed sentence reading tasks in English and Spanish during EEG recording. The group-level results for grammar showed P600s in the native and nonnative language. For semantics, there was an N400 only in the native language. Individual-level ERP patterns revealed that, for native language semantics, about two thirds of participants showed N400s, but approximately one-third showed P600s. For native language grammar, approximately one third of participants exhibited N400s instead of P600s. Individual-level ERPs showed similar variability in the nonnative language for semantics and grammar, and N400/P600 variability in Spanish related to Spanish verbal fluency and grammar knowledge. This contributes knowledge of how nonnative and native language neurocognition compare regarding the processing routes that individuals use during comprehension.

The claim of Esperantists that their language is easier to learn than natural languages has seldom been subjected to an empirical test, and the few tests that have been carried out are not widely known outside the Esperanto community. After an introduction to the Esperanto movement and other experiments based on the teaching of Esperanto, the two “Five-country Experiments” carried out in the 1970s are described and evaluated here. The findings of these tests support the claim of Esperantists but could be challenged mainly because of the wide range of variable factors involved in language learning. These experiments are nevertheless valuable as an attempt to measure some of these variables in a very precise way.

The pilot study reported here used Accommodation Theory in addressing this question: when L2 speakers are asked to reply to a statement which is ethnolinguistically threatening, will their speech diverge (i.e., become less TL-like) ? The study focused on phonological variants in the replies of 13 ESL speakers. Results indicated that the nature of reply was important: only those whose replies were personal and/or ethnically related showed a decrease in TL correctness.

The papers in this issue were presented at a colloquium on The Role of Instruction in Second Language Acquisition held at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, in July 1991. Participants in the Colloquium were the following:

Birgit Harley, OISE, University of Toronto

Patsy M. Lightbown, Concordia University

Michael Long, University of Hawaii

Manfred Pienemann, Sydney University

Bonnie Schwartz, University of Durham

Michael Sharwood Smith, Utrecht University

Nina Spada, McGill University

Bill VanPatten, University of Illinois

Lydia White, McGill University

The Colloquium was sponsored by Concordia University and McGill University as well as by research grants from the government of Quebec through its Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l'aide à la recherche and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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.

This study builds upon previous research investigating the construct validity of phraseological complexity as an index of L2 development and proficiency. Whereas previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons of written productions across proficiency levels, the current study compares the longitudinal development of phraseological complexity in written and oral productions elicited over a 21-month period from learners of French. We also improve upon the state of the art by including L1 data to benchmark learner levels of phraseological complexity. Phraseological complexity, operationalized as the diversity (no. types) and sophistication (PMI) of adjectival modifiers (adjective + noun) and direct objects (verb + noun), was generally higher in learner writing as compared to speaking. Over the study period, the sophistication of phraseological units increased slightly but developmental patterns were found to differ between tasks, highlighting the importance of considering task characteristics when measuring phraseological complexity.