Emergentist, usage-based L2 research has witnessed that emphasizing formulaic sequences as entry points in meaning-based instructional contexts contributes to the development of linguistic comprehension and production. Related studies have thus far striven to find the most effective methods of highlighting these word strings. This study explored…

Describes a study in which English relative clauses were elicited from two groups of Italian learners: formal learners and informal learners. The results agreed with the order of acquisition predicted by the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan and Comrie, 1977, 1979). (Author/SED)

Four separate experiments were completed using the same stimulus materials but different groups of subjects to determine if orienting tasks created problems of control in incidental/intentional learning studies. Subjects were all Caucasians and heterogeneous in age (from 24 to 64 years), educational experiences, and career choices. Those in the…

This handbook provides an integrated discussion of key issues in second language acquisition (SLA). The 24 chapters include the following: (1) "The Scope of Inquiry and the Goals of SLA" (Catherine J. Doughty and Michael H. Long); (2) "On the Nature of Interlanguage Representation: Universal Grammar in the Second Language"…

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…