Focuses on the relevance of principles of information organization in adult second language acquisition. Looks at typological features of information structure that allow speakers to organize and shape the flow of information when carrying out complex tasks and pinpoints factors that lead to the selection of linguistic form. The nature of the…

Investigates the compounding parameter in the second language (L2) Spanish interlanguage of English and French native speakers in light of the subset principle and its predictions for the process of L2 development. (Author/VWL)

Uses data from English-speaking children learning French in the Toronto French Immersion Program as evidence to support the 1981 study by Gundel and Tarone on the acquisition of pronouns by Chinese- and Spanish-speaking adults learning English. This study concluded that the acquisition of direct object pronouns proceeds in three stages. (SED)

This experimental study on English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages investigates the interaction of universal principles and first language knowledge in interlanguage grammars by focusing on verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation. (Author/VWL)

The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English and Mandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and a sentence-transcription task. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects of noise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. (Author/JL)

Data collected from both native and non-native speakers' linguistic performances in five request and seven apology situations revealed a systematic difference in length of utterance in speech acts by non-native speakers as compared to native speakers. Deviation from native norms of utterance length can cause pragmatic failure in several ways.…