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…

Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

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…

Some second language (L2) acquisition researchers have suggested that learners should be made aware of cross-linguistic similarity for them to benefit from cognateness. To test this assumption, we ran two longitudinal classroom quasi-experiments with Polish learners of English. We chose 30 Polish-English cognates, 30 false cognates, and 30…

Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills; less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input. This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100…

This paper examines outsourced call center interactions to illustrate how these contexts can enhance pronunciation analysis and training. Public opinion in the United States and the United Kingdom regarding the perceived "pronunciation problems" of agents based in call centers in Outer-Circle English-speaking countries is typically…

Multisite research (MSR) offers the key advantages of greater statistical power and external validity via larger and more diverse participant pools. In second language acquisition (SLA) research, recent developments in meta-analysis have created a robust foundation for MSR. Although logistical and financial obstacles can complicate expansion…

After discussing key issues in the aptitude literature and presenting an updated, multicomponential model of cognitive language aptitude, we consider two analyses from a longitudinal investigation using aptitude to predict success in language learning. Aptitude is conceptualized as a special talent for learning languages and a ceiling on success.…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

Over the past decade, the LLAMA language aptitude test battery has come to play an increasingly important role as an instrument in research on individual differences in language development. However, a potentially serious problem that has been pointed out by several scholars is that the LLAMA has not yet been carefully validated. We addressed this…

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 evaluated second language (L2) phraseological development using a directional association measure (delta P) that assesses the directional formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations. The study examined (a) whether learners develop their sensitivity to the distributional properties of recurrent multiword combinations as their…

Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

This study investigated L2 Korean speakers' self-assessment of speech comprehensibility and accentedness, including a conceptual replication of Trofimovich, Isaacs, Kennedy, Saito, and Crowther (2016, Experiment 1) and exploratory analyses of individual differences in self-assessment. L2 Korean speakers (N = 198) self-assessed their…

This systematic review surveyed research on the associations between sleep and the memory processes involved in word learning in infancy. We found only 16 studies that addressed this topic directly, identifying associations between infant sleep and the memory processes, the identification of word forms in running speech, and the stabilization and…