This article provides a conceptual review of the principles of input spacing as they might relate specifically to oral task repetition research and presents some of the common methodological considerations from the broader input spacing literature. The specific considerations discussed include the interaction between intersession intervals and…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

Listening comprehension is a real-time process, yet very little is known about the variables affecting real-time second language (L2) listening. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of syntactic complexity and word frequency on L2 listening. Furthermore, the role of the listener's working memory capacity in listening comprehension…

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…

The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

Integrated test tasks, such as listening-to-speak or reading-to-write, are increasingly used in second language assessment despite relatively limited empirical insights into what they assess. Most research on integrated tasks has primarily focused on the productive skills involved; studies exploring the receptive skills mostly investigated tasks…

This book examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language (L2) development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach, sociocultural theory, the variationist approach, and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

This study examined two common accounts of heritage speakers' nonnative attainment in their heritage/first language (L1), one attributing it to the influence of the second language (L2) and another to insufficient L1 input. Three groups of children who were heritage speakers of Arabic and who varied in their age of L2 exposure and type and amount…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…