Researchers have claimed that recasts might be ambiguous as feedback. Because recasts serve a dual function, as both feedback and conversational response, learners might not always interpret them as feedback (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997). This study explores how learners interpret recasts they notice (as responses to content, negative evidence,…

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was…

Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9].…

In "What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered" (1999) Fiona Cowie addresses three questions: (1) What is nativism? (2) What is meant by calling some trait "innate"? and (3) What types of evidence should be offered when claiming innateness? This review concentrates on these questions as they pertain to Chomsky's faculties-based account of language…

The use of four types of psychological state words (physiological, emotional, desire, and cognitive) during mother-child play sessions at ages 3, 4, and 5 years was examined in 30 children diagnosed with delayed expressive language at 24-31 months and 15 age-matched comparison children with typical development. The children's mean length of…

Recent research indicates that the statistical properties of the input have an impact on the prosodic shape of young children's word production. However, it is still not clear whether the effects of input statistics emerge from the frequency of prosodic structures or the frequency of individual lexical items. This issue is investigated in this…

Forty Polish children aged between 1;8 and 2;3 were trained over two training sessions in the comprehension of the preposition POD [UNDER]. In the experiment, two variables were manipulated: a within subjects variable of SITUATION and a between subjects variable of LINGUISTIC INPUT. The effect of situation could be found in all trained groups,…

Instructors rely on asynchronous exchanges to provide learners with authentic input and opportunities to communicate in the TL. While most practitioners recognize the advantages of e-mail exchanges, learner benefits are not an automatic byproduct of participation in an exchange. This paper presents findings from an e-mail exchange carried out…

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive teaching approaches to the acquisition of pragmatic competence on learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, 60 adult native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level proficiency in English were each randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, which consisted of 3…

This paper reports a study that examined the categories of pedagogical knowledge (knowledge related to the act of teaching) of novice ESL teachers as gleaned from their verbal reports of what they were thinking about while teaching and compared these categories to those found for experienced teachers in an earlier study (Gatbonton, 1999). The goal…

Responds to Ellis (2002), which suggests the statistical structure of the linguistic environment is a crucial and relatively neglected variable in language learning. This approach makes three assumptions about cognition and language learning that are not universally shared. Describes a distributed, instance-based approach that retains key features…

Providing students with lively, authentic comprehensible input is one of the most important tasks of introductory German teachers. Using a Tablet PC can enable teachers to improve the quality of the comprehensible input they provide their students. This article describes how integrating a Tablet PC into daily teaching processes allows classroom…

One of the genuine contributions of theoretical linguistics to the interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics is to elucidate the nature of "what should be taught" and "how it should be taught". Traditionally, the input supplied in vocabulary teaching has consisted either of word lists (most often) or of words-in-context…

Several researchers have found that the type of task and learners' level of L2 proficiency are major determinants of the type and amount of metatalk. This paper is the first attempt to investigate potential interactions among the type of metatalk, the type of task and learners' level of L2 proficiency. Intermediate and advanced Japanese learners…