Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty with novel L2 phonological contrasts, limiting their ability to establish contrastive lexical representations of L2 words. It has been demonstrated that the availability of orthographic input (OI), and variables interacting with OI, can shape the inferences learners make about L2…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

This paper mainly explores the impacts of presenting new words in semantically-related (SR) sets on vocabulary learning. 38 students from two classes of Grade 2 in Taiyuan Foreign Language School (Senior High School Section) participate in the whole process. The same vocabulary items unknown to all students are taught to them in 4 lessons. The…

Presents results of two case studies involving the acquisition of English in a natural environment, as well as the results of two judgment tests in which subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing both correctly and incorrectly used dative verbs. (SL)

A discussion of the translation process focuses on inferencing strategy, using attributes and contexts that are familiar in recognizing or making sense of what is unfamiliar in a text. Examples drawn from Belgian translation student work are used to illustrate this principle in operation, at several levels of difficulty. The examples come from…

Essays in second language acquisition include: "The State of the Art in Second Language Acquisition Research" (Josine Lalleman); "Crosslinguistic Influence with Special Reference to the Acquisition of Grammar" (Michael Sharwood Smith); "Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants: A Multiple Case Study of Turkish and…

This 647-item bibliography is limited to reports on empirical research and discussions of research reports on various aspects of foreign language learning, mostly drawn from American and British journals and Ph.D. dissertations since 1925 and from ERIC documents. Principal topics include content of teaching materials, cognitive effects of…