The study of language development in second language acquisition naturally leads to information about linguistic processes of second language acquisition, but it also sheds light on learners' individual differences. This article examines the acquisition of the future in L2 English and explores how learners in a longitudinal study respond to input,…

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories…

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

This study investigates international students' perceptions of the issues they face using English as a second language while attending American higher education institutions. In order to fully understand those challenges involved in learning English as a Second Language, it is necessary to know the extent to which international students have…

In this article we report on an 8-year process that included three successive iterations of the following cycle: (a) development of instructional technology, (b) formative evaluation, and (c) modification of the technology. From the first formative evaluation to the last, our students told us that they found heavily contextualized language…

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…

This paper studies the linguistic input attended by a deaf child exposed to cued speech (CS) in the final part of her prelinguistic period (18-24 months). Subjects are the child, her mother, and her therapist. Analyses have provided data about the quantity of input directed to the child (oral input, more than 1,000 words per half-an-hour session;…

Twenty-four caregivers and their 2- to 4-year-old children took part in a storybook reading task in which caregivers taught children novel labels for familiar objects. Findings indicate parental speech could provide a rich source of information to children in learning how different lexical categories are expressed in their native language.…

Investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual (Spanish-English) acquisition context. Also explored whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual…

In response to Ellis (2002), which resurrects the notion that language acquisition consists of frequency-based abstraction of regularities from input, this article suggests Ellis ignores fundamental and well-known problems, including the poverty of the stimulus, cases of instantaneous acquisition, and evidence for innate knowledge. (Author/VWL)

Responds to Ellis (2002), which focuses on frequency in language processing, language use, and language acquisition. Contextualizes the frequency factor in terms of the evolution of second language acquisition (SLA) research. Suggests that although relevant and important, the frequency factor requires greater definition and qualification.…

Investigated the relationship between memory for input and inductive learning of morphological rules relating to functional categories in a semiartificial form of Italian. A verbatim memory task was used as both the vehicle for presenting sentences and as a continuous measure of memory performance. (Author/VWL)

Reviews processing (PI) instruction, outlines a model of input processing, describes the nature of PI, and discusses research on it to date. (Author/VWL)

Responds to VanPatten's update of the findings for processing instruction. Questions the explanatory adequacy of the model of input processing that VanPatten proposed and that underpins his pedagogic proposals. Questions the validity of the limited-capacity, single-resource model of attention proposed for second language learning. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on two unrelated matters that are central to the study of how language acquisition works: (1) the role of input in the acquisition of a first language, particularly how children are able to avoid the potentially damaging effects of misleading feedback; and (2) the role of a particular aspect of cognition in second language learning, namely…