This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

This study examined the roles of speech perception and phonological processing in reading and spelling acquisition for native and nonnative speakers of English in the 1st grade. The performance of 50 children (23 native English speakers and 27 native Korean speakers) was examined on tasks assessing reading and spelling, phonological processing,…

Seeing language as a complex, dynamic system and language use/acquisition as dynamic adaptedness ("a make-do" solution) to a specific context proves a useful way of understanding change in progress, such as that which occurs with a developing L2 system. This emergentist shift of perspective provides another way of understanding previously observed…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) deserve praise for their superlative synthesis of literature relating to grammatical processing, as well as for their original contributions to this area of research. CF "explore the idea that there might be fundamental differences between child L1 and adult L2 processing." The researchers present evidence that adult second…

Individual differences in nonword repetition (NWR) show a particularly strong association with vocabulary acquisition for both first- (L1) and second-language (L2) learners, and they serve as a behavioral marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in children (Gathercole, 2006). However, this association is susceptible to alternative…

This study addresses the role of output in second language (L2) acquisition by comparing processing instruction (PI) to communicative output (CO) tasks. Participants included 80 English-speaking adults from six university course sections of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each treatment (PI = 27; CO = 28) and two others comprising a…

This paper investigates object omission in French longitudinal production from two English-speaking children (Lightbown, 1977). Similar patterns of object omission are observed: direct objects start being dropped as transitive verbs are emerging and licit and illicit null objects occur in all recordings thereafter. Moreover, the incidence of…

An error analysis of the oral production of Korean adults learning English was performed on informant speech samples, using Corder's Algorithm for providing data for description of idiosyncratic dialects as a guide for determing error. The procedures of error analysis and morpheme acquisition studies were combined to address the following…

The following papers are included: (1) "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition" (Krashen); (2) "Talking to Foreigners versus Talking to Children: Similarities and Differences" (Freed); (3) "The Levertov Machine" (Stevick); (4) "Acquiring a Second Language when You're Not the Underdog" (Edelsky and…

Comparison of the cue usage of English/Dutch and Dutch/English bilinguals with varying amounts of second language exposure to that of native speaker control groups reveals that, with increasing exposure, cue usage in the second language gradually shifts from that appropriate to the first language to that appropriate for the second. (Author/CB)

Describes a study which sought to determine what strategies beginning and intermediate students of English as a second language used in learning a number of language tasks. Teachers were interviewed to detect their familiarity with student strategies and to determine whether they introduce strategies to their students during instruction. (SED)

Emphasizes the importance of psycholinguistic research in enabling us to discover phenomena which will later be seen to have representations in the brain. In addition, the different ways a second language is learned and used, as well as the differences in the actual language structures themselves, will participate in determining brain organization…

The distinction in meanings of the English word "educated" and Spanish "educado" is used to illustrate a theory of semantic memory for the bilingual that proposes two lexical stores, one for each language, in close cooperation with and connected by one semantic memory. The postulated relation between the lexicons and the semantic memory is…

Discusses interlanguage development in terms of three questions: (1) What requirements do learners impose on their own interlanguage output? (2) What linguistic knowledge concerning the fulfillment of their requirements do learners have stored in their memories? and (3) What linguistic forms do learners actually use in their interlanguage output,…