Whether or not to teach grammar explicitly is an issue that has long been debated in the field of SLA. There seems to be a growing consensus among many researchers now in support of embedding some element of explicit instruction within a communicative curriculum. The main arguments in support of explicit instruction are threefold: two widely cited…

Providing feedback on EFL Learners' speaking errors has been extensively researched, with numerous studies highlighting its benefits (Van Ha, et al., 2021; Hartono, 2022). This study investigates the impact of "pending feedback", a type of feedback where students must independently discover the correct answer. This research emphasizes…

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error-driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation-based accounts (Pickering &…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…

As one type of the most extensively used sentences, English questions are must-learn grammatical structures for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). However, it is commonly seen that English learners across proficiency levels produce ungrammatical English questions. To determine the source of learners' erroneous production, we…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children's (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents' use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child's use of inflectional affixes and their…

Different linguistic classifications of Spanish and Slovak make the differences between these two languages. The genetic criterion classifies languages, clustering them into language families, the largest among which is the Indoeuropean one. The typological criterion divides languages according to their grammatical structures. Meanwhile, Slovak is…

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Interlanguage has been the main development of field research on second language acquisition (SLA). According to Richard et al (1996) Interlanguage is one of the kinds of language that can be produced by second language learners in the process of acquiring or learning a new language. The influence of the universal grammar of the first language in…

While formal L3 morphosyntactic acquisition research has focused on the roles of the L1 versus L2 during the L3 initial stages, we examine their roles during development. Specifically, we explore whether the L3 (here, Portuguese) revision process after non-facilitative transfer differs whether the initial L3 representation reflects the L1 or L2.…

This study examines the role of cross-linguistic transfer versus general processing strategy in two groups of heritage speakers (n = 28 per group) with the same heritage language -- Russian -- and typologically different dominant languages: English and Estonian. A group of homeland Russian speakers (n = 36) is tested to provide baseline…