This study is the first to explore microdevelopment in sociolinguistic evaluative judgments of standard German and Austro-Bavarian dialect by adult second language learners of German by using dense time serial measurements. Intensive longitudinal data (10 observations per participant) were collected from four learners at approximately weekly…

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

When learning novel vocabulary in a third language (L3) through translations in the first language (L1), bilinguals may have more available cognitive resources and more accumulated experience in language regulation compared to when learning through translations in the second language (L2). In a study designed to test language of instruction (LOI)…

This study examined first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) ambiguous pronoun resolution by investigating (a) whether L1 influence takes place at the level of the pronominal form (form-dependent influence) and/or at the level of the construction in which the form appears (construction-dependent influence) and (b) whether effects…

This study investigated the predictions of two approaches to second language acquisition. According to the usage-based approach, learner knowledge results from the strengths and weaknesses of input-driven statistical learning. According to the learner-varieties approach, pragmatic communication principles and language-internal constraints play…

Despite contrary research findings, many laypeople still claim that starting second language (L2) instruction early yields linguistic advantages. This assertion is again undermined by a 5-year longitudinal study conducted in Switzerland testing the English language skills of 636 secondary-school students who had all learned Standard German and…

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light…

The effects of production and listening training on the subsequent comprehension of foreign-accented speech were investigated in a training-test paradigm. During training, German nonnative (L2) and English native (L1) participants listened to a story spoken by a German speaker who replaced all English /?/s with /t/ (e.g., *"teft" for…

This article focuses on a theoretical and empirical exploration of developmental trajectories and individual learner variation in second language (L2) acquisition. Taking a processability perspective, I view learner language as a dynamic system that includes predictable universal developmental trajectories as well as individual learner variation,…

Adequately responding to linguistic diversity in the classroom is imperative in European school contexts, not least because of current migratory movements. This article presents the results of an intervention study with primary school English-foreign-language learners in Germany (N = 42, M[subscript age] = 8.70 years) from linguistically diverse…

This study investigated how standard and substandard varieties of first language (L1) Dutch affect grammatical gender assignments to nouns in second language (L2) German. While German distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, the masculine--feminine distinction has nearly disappeared in Standard Dutch. Many substandard Belgian…

This article considers explicit knowledge and processes in second language (L2) learning from a usage-based theoretical perspective. It reports on the long-term development of a single instructed adult learner's use of two L2 constructions, the German Perfekt of "gehen" ("go," "walk") and "fahren"…

This study investigated first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition in two age-matched groups of 2- to 6-year-old kindergarten children over the course of 2.5 years. The immersion group participated in a partial English immersion program whereas the conventional instruction group received a conventional L2 course (30 minutes per week); the…