Mastering the phonological aspects of a second language (L2) poses significant challenges for adult learners, often affecting their intelligibility in acquiring that language (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). McAllister (1997) has highlighted L2 learners' struggles in perceiving and producing novel segmental features, which is corroborated by…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts approximately 7% of the population and is characterized by unexplained deficits in expressive and/or receptive components of language. A common procedural learning task, serial reaction time (SRT), has been used to develop models of the basis of DLD.…

Student veterans are often viewed in popular culture with a deficit mindset. They are "wounded warriors" who are navigating mental health challenges, academically underprepared, and non-traditional students balancing other responsibilities beyond college. Despite potential lingering effects of military service, student veterans bring…

The goal of this study was to describe how underlying vocabulary knowledge manifests into vocabulary usage, and in turn, how usage predicts writing quality among adult basic education (ABE) learners. ABE learners were administered tasks that measured vocabulary knowledge, in the forms of both vocabulary breadth and depth. Participants were also…

Numeracy is important for everyday life. Being numerate has a positive impact on the quality of life of individuals, with positive economic, health, and social outcomes. Despite this, little is known about the role of numeracy in the lives of adults with intellectual disability (ID). Design research has been used to develop ways to support…

The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect-speaking and…

Design Research (DR) has been used to develop means of supporting mathematical learning for typically-developing students. This study investigated the use of DR to develop context specific tools to support adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) to improve their numeracy capabilities and engagement in daily tasks. Using observation and…

For many people, learning a second language as an adult is a challenging endeavor. Much interest in the study of adult second language learning has concerned the type of input that learners receive in their second language, with findings suggesting that second language learners are often exposed to a register of speech called 'foreigner talk' that…

The present study investigated whether adult learners of second language (L2) can automatically activate emotional connotation during emotional word recognition as compared native (L1) users and whether L2 use plays a significant role in it. The automaticity of activation was measured through the emotional Stroop task. In this task, emotional…

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e.…

Target language instruction in multilingual settings cannot ignore the linguistic diversity of both the learners and the society. Rather than ignoring the individual and societal multilingualism, leveraging them as resources in learning the target language can be beneficial. Developing such multilingual instruction is an organic, iterative process…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

The present work examines the impact of code-switching (CS) on novel word learning in adult second language (L2) learners of Spanish. Participants completed two sessions (1-3 days apart). In the first session, they were taught 32 nonwords corresponding to novel creatures. Training occurred across 4 conditions: (1) a sentence in English only, (2) a…

The current study investigated the role of visual short-term memory, working memory, and declarative memory as individual differences in the earliest stages of vocabulary and syntactic learning in "Duolingo"-based language instruction. Thirty-eight L1-Greek adults completed memory tasks and engaged in learning Navajo on…