The traditional morpheme order studies in second language acquisition have tried to demonstrate the existence of a fixed order of acquisition of English morphemes, regardless of the second language learner's background. Such orders have been taken as evidence of the preprogrammed nature of language acquisition. This article argues for a…

Can an early learned second language influence speech production after living many years in an exclusively monolingual environment? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of discontinued early bilingualism in heritage speakers who moved abroad and switched language dominance from the second to the primary learned language. We used…

One of the most enduring questions in the field of bilingualism is whether bilingual infants and children initially have one language system or two. Research with adults indicates that, while bilinguals do not represent their languages in two fully encapsulated language systems, they are able to functionally differentiate their languages. This…

Infants often pay special attention to speech sounds, and they appear to detect key features of these sounds. To investigate the neural foundation of speech perception in infants, we measured cortical activation using near-infrared spectroscopy. We presented the following three types of auditory stimuli while 3-month-old infants watched a silent…

The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

This study investigated the role of inhibition in second language (L2) learners' phonological processing. Participants were Spanish learners of L2 English and American learners of L2 Spanish. We measured inhibition through a retrieval-induced inhibition task. Accuracy of phonological representations (perception and production) was assessed through…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

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…

In this article, I explore how connectionism might expand its role in second language acquisition (SLA) theory by showing how some symbolic models of bilingual and second language lexical memory can be reduced to a biologically realistic (i.e., neurally plausible) connectionist model. This integration or hybridization of the two models follows the…

We use insights and methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive psychology to develop an account of embodied word and grammar searches as socially distributed planning practices. These practices, which were produced by three intermediate learners of Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL), occurred massively in natural data…

This study employed synthetic and meta-analytic techniques to review the literature on the Cognition Hypothesis, which predicts that increasing task complexity influences the quality of second language production. Based on 8 inclusion criteria, 17 published studies were synthesized according to key features. A subset of these studies (k = 9) was…

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories--the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1…

Previous research has demonstrated substantially improved second language (L2) vocabulary learning when spoken word forms are varied using multiple talkers, speaking styles, or speaking rates. In contrast, the present study varied visual representations of referents for target vocabulary. English speakers learned Spanish words in formats of no…

Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts an order of emergence of morphosyntactic elements in second language (L2) production data. This research investigates whether the same order of emergence can be detected in L2 reception data, specifically, data from a timed audio grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The results from three related…

Although fluency constitutes an essential component of second language (L2) proficiency, there are mixed results and gaps in the literature on how L2 speakers' fluency differs from fluent speech production in a first language (L1). The research reported in this article investigated utterance fluency and cognitive fluency of L1 English…