Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun…

In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on…

Adult second language (L2) learning often exhibits great variability in its rate and outcome. Although research shows that learning trajectories are partly shaped by social and contextual factors (e.g. Larson-Hall, 2008), certain learner factors play an important role in enhancing L2 pronunciation learning by helping L2 learners notice and process…

Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non-native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

In this article, we challenge the notion that aptitude--operationalized as grammatical sensitivity as measured by the Words in Sentences section of the Modern Language Aptitude Test--is central to adult second language (L2) acquisition. We present the findings of a study on the acquisition of two properties of Japanese, head-final word order and…

The present study was an attempt to examine the impact of input flooding (IF) and textual enhancement (TIE) on EFL learners' syntactic development. Four homogenous groups were selected based on the pre-test and placement tests. During the treatment, the first group (i.e., IF) received reading comprehension passages in which the structure was…

Discussions about the adult L2 learning capacity often take as their starting point stages where considerable L2 knowledge has already been accumulated. This paper probes the absolute earliest stages of learning and investigates what lexical knowledge adult learners can extract from complex, continuous speech in an unknown language after minimal…

Formulaic language is widely recognized to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively…

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

Understanding the mechanisms learners use to process target language input is crucial to developing a complete model of both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. If adult L2 learners are found to process the target language with mechanisms that differ from those used by child L1 learners and adult native speakers, what…

Investigated whether beginning adult learners, given auditory stimuli, were equally likely to represent French gender subclasses using phonological, morphosyntactic, and/or semantic representations. Data from adult English speakers learning patterned French and translation equivalent lists indicated that the construct of input for gender learning…