A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning…

Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of…

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2-specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) influences L2 phonological and lexical encoding.…

The interactionist hypothesis holds that conversational interaction facilitates second language (L2) learning by providing learners opportunities to receive meaningful input, modify their output, and attend to language form. Although research has often explored the efficacy of different types of L2 instruction (deductive or inductive), few studies…

The involvement load hypothesis (ILH) was designed to predict the effectiveness of instructional tasks for incidental L2 vocabulary learning. In this meta-analysis we examined 398 effect sizes from 42 empirical studies (N = 4,628) to explore (a) the overall predictive ability of the ILH, (b) the relative effects of different components of the ILH…

The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

This study employed synthetic and meta-analytic techniques to review the literature on the Cognition Hypothesis, which predicts that increasing task complexity influences the quality of second language production. Based on 8 inclusion criteria, 17 published studies were synthesized according to key features. A subset of these studies (k = 9) was…

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories--the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1…

Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts an order of emergence of morphosyntactic elements in second language (L2) production data. This research investigates whether the same order of emergence can be detected in L2 reception data, specifically, data from a timed audio grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The results from three related…

This article explores the influence of the learning environment on the second language acquisition of Swedish. Data were collected longitudinally over 1 year from 35 university students studying Swedish in Malmo, Sweden, and in Melbourne, Australia. Three areas were investigated: grammar, pragmatics, and lexicon. The development of grammar was…

Tested the predictions of three major hypotheses of relative clause acquisition in second language acquisition: the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH) and the SO Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH). Analyses of data collected from 61 learners of English as a Second Language in three different elicitation…

Studies on second-language acquisition of reflexives have experienced difficulties assessing learners' knowledge of the binding principles because of problems associated with ambiguous sentences where there is more than one antecedent for a reflexive. In this study, English-as-a-Second-Language students were tested using a variety of sentence…