This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it…

Contrastive analysis a priori predicts facts of possible errors in learning a second language that contrastive analysis a posteriori cannot explain. In a study of relative clause formation, the latter approach shows that students have no trouble, whereas the former approach shows the task to be so difficult that they avoid it. (AG)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

Results of a diagnostic test revealed that Thai students have no more trouble in learning English prepositions than others learning English as a second language; all the groups had difficulty. Error analysis was found to be just as effective in explaining mistakes as contrastive analysis. (AG)