Most second language acquisition (SLA) research has documented the processes involved in learning second/foreign languages, with few studies focusing on the durability of attained second language (L2) skills once instructed learners/users are no longer receiving formal instruction. The current study examines the effects of continued exposure and…

Current L2 utterance fluency literature tends to operationalize disfluency as isolated, individual features. However, disfluency features often co-occur at one location or across multiple locations in one utterance. This study explores the co-occurrence of L2 disfluency features in a speech corpus from 71 L1 and L2 speakers of English across…

This study examined the influence of cognate status and language distance on simultaneous bilingual children's vocabulary acquisition. It aimed to tease apart effects of word-level similarities and language-level similarities, while also exploring the role of individual-level variation in age, exposure, and nontarget language proficiency. Children…

This article presents a theoretical review of and methodological guidelines for the study of two key notions in second language acquisition research, complexity and difficulty. The term "complexity" has gained considerable currency over the past decades and has taken on a wide range of meanings. We argue for a more restricted…

Native language (L1) attrition is ubiquitous in modern globalized society, but its cognitive/psycholinguistic mechanisms are poorly understood. We investigated lexico-semantic L1 attrition in L1 Russian immigrants in Israel, who predominantly use their second language (L2), Hebrew, in daily life. We included Russian monolinguals as a control…

For Spanish nouns, masculine gender is unmarked and feminine is marked. Effects of markedness on gender agreement processing are inconsistent, possibly owing to differences between online methods. This study presents a reanalysis of eye-tracking data from Keating's (2022) study on the processing of noun-adjective gender agreement in speakers of…

The present study investigates the impact of bidialectalism on L2 production, focusing on the role of dialect modes. Shanghai-Mandarin Chinese bidialectal speakers were recruited to produce second language (L2) English vowels under the influence of either Shanghai or Mandarin Chinese mode. Results showed that in the Shanghai mode, participants'…

We explore how general principles of learning apply to and combine with usage-based approaches to language learning and teaching, with a focus on the effects of order of exposure to new information in second language (L2) instruction. Although the effects of input spacing and timing on memory and learning have been previously explored (see Rogers,…

This cross-sectional study examines the sociopragmatic use of pitch and fluency features in requests among second language (L2) Chinese learners at two proficiency levels alongside native Chinese speakers. Twenty-eight L2 learners completed a 40-item oral discourse task with two types of request-making situations: (a) a high-imposition request to…

Collocational priming is a priming effect induced by collocationally related words; it has been taken to explain the cognitive reality of collocation. Collocational priming has largely been observed in first language (L1) speakers, whereas work on the representation of collocation in a second language (L2) is still limited. In the present study,…

The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but the problem remains. This methodological review provides a critical analysis not only of the most commonly…

Inferring the meaning of words and then verifying one's interpretations is widely believed to create relatively strong memories of the items. According to the available research, it is when the inferences are accurate that the learning outcomes are the most promising. The present study extends this inquiry to idioms. Fifty-six ESL learners were…

Because of authentic exposure, study-abroad sojourners are expected to become more proficient in terms of holistic formulaicity (defined as targetlike language use of intensifiers, fillers, multiword sequences, lexical features, verb-argument constructions, pragmatic and discourse features, and so on), use of formulaic sequences, and lexical…

A central question in multilingualism research is how multiple languages interact. Most studies have focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) effects on a third language (L3), but a small number of studies dedicated to the opposite transfer direction have suggested stronger L3 influence on L2 than on L1 in postpuberty learners. In our study,…

This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end…