The traditional morpheme order studies in second language acquisition have tried to demonstrate the existence of a fixed order of acquisition of English morphemes, regardless of the second language learner's background. Such orders have been taken as evidence of the preprogrammed nature of language acquisition. This article argues for a…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

There is a general consensus among second-language (L2) researchers today that lexical inferencing (LIF) is among the most common techniques that L2 learners use to generate meaning for unknown words they encounter in context. Indeed, claims about the salience and pervasiveness of LIF for L2 learners rely heavily upon data obtained via concurrent…

This article explores the usage- and exemplar-based roots of second language (L2) negation construction learning. Based on two longitudinal case studies involving two adult L2 English learners and a corpus of 63 three-hour sessions of recorded classroom interactions, the study shows that L2 learning follows the predictions of usage-based models of…

The notion of language as a complex adaptive system has been conceived within an agent-based framework, which highlights the significance of individual-level variation in the characteristics and contextual circumstances of the learner/speaker. Yet, in spite of this emphasis, currently we know relatively little about the interplay among language,…

Recent currents in language learning research highlight the social and emergent aspects of second language (L2) development and recognize that learners need opportunities for interaction in meaningful contexts supported by explicit attention to language itself. These perspectives suggest new ways of conceptualizing the challenges faced by children…

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…