We tested the prosodic hypothesis that the temporal alignment of a speaker's beat gestures in a sentence influences syntactic parsing by driving the listener's attention. Participants chose between two possible interpretations of relative-clause (RC) ambiguous sentences, while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We manipulated the…

This study adopted Ambridge's research paradigm to examine the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and verb semantics in second language (L2) acquisition of English "un-" prefixation. Three groups of Chinese learners of English (second- and fourth-year English majors and teachers of English) rated the acceptability of 48 "un-"…

We respond here to Pienemann's critique of our study that appeared earlier this year in the Language Learning Special Issue entitled "Orders and Sequences in the Acquisition of L2 Morphosyntax, 40 Years On" and guest edited by Jan Hulstijn, Rod Ellis, and Søren Eskildsen. Pienemann objected to our claim that the Teachability Hypothesis…

This chapter introduces three applications of Bayesian inference to common and novel issues in second language research. After a review of the critiques of conventional hypothesis testing, our focus centers on ways Bayesian inference can be used for dealing with missing data, for testing theory-driven substantive hypotheses without a default null…

Recent theorizing on second language (L2) motivation has proposed viewing motivation as a function of the language learners' vision of their desired future language selves. This would suggest that the intensity of motivation is partly dependent on the learners' capability to generate mental imagery. In order to test this hypothesis, this study…

A classroom study was designed to test the hypothesis that explicit knowledge is used by second-language (L2) learners in a free written response task if that knowledge is present. Eighty-one 12-18-year-old learners of Dutch as an L2 took part in a computer-assisted language learning experiment receiving either explicit or implicit instruction…

Learning the Chinese tone system is a major challenge to students of Chinese as a second or foreign language. Part of the problem is that the spoken Chinese syllable presents a complex perceptual input that overlaps tone with segments. This complexity can be addressed through directing attention to the critical features of a component (tone in…

This article examines the acquisition of Korean imperfective markers, the progressive "-ko iss-" and the resultative "-a iss-," with a view to understanding how tense/aspect morphology expands beyond prototype associations with inherent aspects of the verbs. We hypothesized that "-a iss-" will develop later than "-ko iss-," but that the…