This article provides a conceptual review of the principles of input spacing as they might relate specifically to oral task repetition research and presents some of the common methodological considerations from the broader input spacing literature. The specific considerations discussed include the interaction between intersession intervals and…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

This study investigated the effects of task complexity on child learners' second language (L2) gains, the relationship between aptitude and L2 development, and the extent to which task complexity influences this relationship when recasts are provided. Sixty child EFL learners were assigned to two experimental groups. During the treatment, one…

This study aimed to advance research on first and second language future-time expression in Spanish and to demonstrate the strengths of combining functionalist, concept-oriented approaches (e.g., Andersen, 1984; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Shirai, 1995; von Stutterheim & Klein, 1987) with variationist approaches. The study targeted 140 participants…

This study investigated the role of corrective feedback timing in the acquisition of Spanish noun--adjective gender agreement. Forty-five learners completed a communicative task via synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in one of three groups (immediate, delayed, control). The immediate-feedback group received error reformulations…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

This investigation examined two techniques that may help learners focus on second language (L2) constructions when recasts are provided during meaning-based communicative activities: altering the cognitive complexity of tasks and manipulating the input frequency distributions of target constructions. We first independently assessed the validity of…

The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the…

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of…

This study investigates the source of second language (L2) learners' low use of conventional expressions--one part of pragmalinguistic competence--by investigating the relationship between recognition and production of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Two tasks--an aural recognition task and an oral production task--were completed by 122…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

Explored the effects of inherent task structure and processing load on narrative retelling task performance, analyzing task performance in terms of competition among fluency, complexity, and accuracy. Research with young adults found that degree of inherent task structure more strongly affected fluency of performance. Processing load influenced…