The present study focuses on the influence of starting age and input on foreign language learning. In relation to starting age, the study investigates whether early starters in instructional settings achieve the same kind of long-term advantage as learners in naturalistic settings and it complements previous research by using data from oral…

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…