This study examined the role of child cognitive abilities for procedural and declarative learning in the earliest stages of second language (L2) exposure. In the context of a computer game, 53 first language Italian monolingual children were aurally trained in a novel miniature language over 3 consecutive days. A mixed effects model analysis of…

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers on a bimodal acceptability judgment task that targeted morphologically complex words. A major goal of the study was to compare participants' acceptance of conventional and creative words. Data were collected from 57 adult heritage speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into two…

The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co-occurrences of multiple words) is related to first language (L1) raters' intuitive judgments of second language (L2) speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by 85 Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were…

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form-meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse…

This study investigated the role of corrective feedback timing in the acquisition of Spanish noun--adjective gender agreement. Forty-five learners completed a communicative task via synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in one of three groups (immediate, delayed, control). The immediate-feedback group received error reformulations…

Prior research has reported incidental vocabulary acquisition with complete beginners in a foreign language (FL), within 8 exposures to auditory and written FL word forms presented with a picture depicting their meaning. However, important questions remain about whether acquisition occurs with fewer exposures to FL words in a multimodal situation…

Can an early learned second language influence speech production after living many years in an exclusively monolingual environment? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of discontinued early bilingualism in heritage speakers who moved abroad and switched language dominance from the second to the primary learned language. We used…

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…

This study investigated the role of inhibition in second language (L2) learners' phonological processing. Participants were Spanish learners of L2 English and American learners of L2 Spanish. We measured inhibition through a retrieval-induced inhibition task. Accuracy of phonological representations (perception and production) was assessed through…

Previous studies show that second language (L2) learners with large phonological memory spans outperform learners with smaller memory spans on tests of L2 grammar. The current study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and L2 grammar in more detail than has been done earlier. Specifically, we asked how phonological memory…

The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the…

The present study investigated the effects of two categories of interactional feedback--recasts and elicitations--on learning linguistic forms that arose incidentally in dyadic interaction. The study also identified implicit and explicit forms of each feedback type and examined their subsequent effects immediately after interaction and after 2…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

There is little agreement on the mechanisms involved in second language (L2) processing of regular and irregular inflectional morphology and on the exact role of age, amount, and type of exposure to L2 resulting in differences in L2 input and use. The article contributes to the ongoing debates by reporting the results of two experiments on Russian…