Contending with talker variability has been found to lead to processing costs but also benefits by focusing learners on invariant properties of the signal, indicating that talker variability acts as a desirable difficulty. That is, talker variability may lead to initial costs followed by long-term benefits for retention and generalization. Adult…

Distributional learning is typically understood as (unattended) tracking of stimulus probabilities. Distributional training with speech yields mixed results and the influencing factors have not yet been fully investigated. This study explored whether prior linguistic experience could have an effect on distributional learning outcomes. Czech and…

In this study, we investigated the learning of indexical features by English-speaking adults using a novel experimental paradigm. In a conceptual replication of Rácz, Hay, and Pierrehumbert (2017), participants learned an allomorphy pattern cued by a given social context. The social contexts were represented by conversation partners who differed…

Although the significance of age in second language acquisition is one of the most hotly debated issues in the field, very few studies have directly addressed age differences in the language learning process. The present study investigated learning in a foreign-word repetition task. Young Finnish adults and 8-year-olds repeated back Korean words.…

Few adult second language (L2) learners successfully attain high-level proficiency. Although decades of research on beginning to intermediate stages of L2 learning have identified a number of predictors of the rate of acquisition, little research has examined factors relevant to predicting very high levels of L2 proficiency. The current study,…

Research on second language (L2) phonetic learning indicates that, even in adults, segmental acquisition remains possible through L2 experience. However, the findings of previous cross-sectional studies of vowel and consonant learning have proved difficult to interpret. In this longitudinal investigation of 44 recent arrivals in Canada,…

Based on Carol Chomsky's methodology, an attempt was made to investigate the sequence of acquisition of a set of complex English structures by adult second language learners. The results indicated a development pattern analogous to that reported by Chomsky for child native speakers. (MS)

Analyses of sentence combination data from 33 adult learners of English as a Second Language instructed in sentence combination tasks yielded inconclusive results as to whether implicational generalization (IG) is unidirectional to hierarchy levels implicated by the instructed level. The results suggest that IG is clearly not uniformly maximal to…

Studies of second language acquisition have concentrated primarily on the speech production of their subjects. This article discusses the relationship between speech directed to the learner and his speech production. (Author/KM)

This study investigated second-language (L2) learning to gain a better understanding of learning mechanisms that also operate in child first-language L1 learners. The research was inspired by research on the beneficial effects of child-directed speech CDS. We tried to examine whether such benefits can be observed in the domain of inflectional…

Examines the Monitor Model of adult second language acquisition, and presents an alternate model that avoids difficulties inherent in the Monitor Model and that corresponds to contemporary language development theory. (Author/AM)