Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex, interdisciplinary field of study which has its roots in subjects as varied as cognition and psychology to social applications and actions in anthropology and sociology (Han & Nassaji, 2019). Nearly a century ago, Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky attempted to connect the seemingly disparate areas…

The purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (L2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. Several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of L2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

I review the classic literature in generative grammar and Marr's three-level program for cognitive science to defend the Evaluation Metric as a psychological theory of language learning. Focusing on well-established facts of language variation, change, and use, I argue that optimal statistical principles embodied in Bayesian inference models are…

This article critically reviews strategy research on learning Chinese both as a second and foreign language. Through a careful examination of major data bases in both the Chinese and English languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. Moreover, key limitations in research…

Models of similarity have traditionally assumed that the similarity relation is symmetrical. However, when reversed, similarity statements frequently have different properties from those of the original. Previous attempts to account for the asymmetry of similarity have focused only on literal comparisons, resulting in a tendency to underestimate…

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

Learnability theory is an attempt to illuminate the concept of learnability using a mathematical model of learning. Two models of learning of categorial grammars are examined here: the standard model, in which sentences presented to the learner are flat strings of words, and one in which sentences are presented in the form of functor-argument…

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

Discusses the different theoretical perspectives concerning input data to second-language (L2) learners, and examines the learners contributions to input and the interactions between what learners take in themselves and what is given to them. (58 references) (GLR)

Summarizes a range of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. Argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Connectionism, which provides a set of computational tools for exploring the conditions under which emergent properties arise, is discussed, and simulations of emergence of…

Articulates general principles of learning based on research of the earliest periods of language acquisition in childhood. The principles are meant to be suggestive and to contribute to the development of a first language acquisition-based theory of learning. (78 references) (MDM)

Reexamines the construct of field independence/dependence and its measurement in second-language acquisition research, focusing on its role in language testing and good language-learner theories. (68 references) (Author/CB)

The literature on spelling strategies of normal and learning disabled children is reviewed, and suggestions for the classroom teacher are offered. After a brief examination of this century's attempts to improve the basic school speller, attention is directed to M. Halle and N. Chomsky's research on the English sound system and Chomsky's theory of…

Argues that it is time to begin integrating models of second-language (L2) research, to test and develop integrated models for L2 data, and to develop integrated explanatory theories to explain these data. (22 references) (JL)