This study explored learners' self-generated noticing of L2 input. It is motivated by previous research on input enhancement which suggested that learners are able to notice certain aspects of input on their own without any external means to direct their attention. Drawing on insights that learner-generated noticing is largely mediated by…

This cross-sectional study examined the effect of general proficiency and study-abroad experience on pragmatic comprehension in second-language English. Participants were 25 native English speakers and 64 Japanese college students of English divided into three groups. Group 1 (n = 22) had lower proficiency and no study-abroad experience. Group 2…

The present chapter bridges two lines of neurocognitive research, which are, despite being related, usually discussed separately from each other. The two fields, second language (L2) sentence comprehension and artificial grammar processing, both depend on the successful learning of complex sequential structures. The comparison of the two research…

A study of English speakers' acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portugese is reported. Various structures were tested to separate interlanguage features attributable to first language interference from those universal to second language acquisition. Application of an accessibility hierarchy theory and…

Analysis of data derived from an earlier study of Japanese-English interlanguage shows that discourse-pragmatic markedness conditions on the subject position combine with central aspects of a configurational syntax in the generation of sentential forms, creating a module interface distinct from the native or second language. (38 references)…