This study examined the relationship between external language behavior in the form of intensity of verbal interaction between the learner and his language environment and the effects of this interaction on language abilities as measured by language tests. The subjects were adult learners of English as a second language. (CFM)

Extends the line of research that has recently applied the savings paradigm from cognitive psychology to vocabulary relearning. Second language data from 3044 returnees from Japan and Korea provide evidence of the strongest savings effect yet reported in studies of lexical reactivation. (Author/VWL)

Study of echoic memory interference among students in college introductory Spanish and German courses revealed that students with weaker listening comprehension skills depended more upon vulnerable sensory codes in echoic memory, while students with stronger comprehension relied on stable higher-order codes. (Author/CB)

Discusses whether high levels of skill in one's second language (L2) leads to loss of performance in one's first language (L1). Data are reviewed indicating that a high level of reading skill in L2 may indeed be associated with slower reading in L1. (21 references) (Author/VWL)

Examination of native Chinese Mandarin speakers' identification of monosyllables that included oral and nasal stops representing English/Mandarin contrasts and noncontrasts in syllable-initial/-final positions found that the presence of nasal as opposed to oral stop consonants in the syllables appeared to be the most significant factor affecting…

The usefulness of bilingual dictionaries for vocabulary learning was examined with 293 Japanese university students studying English as a foreign language. Students who used a dictionary during reading scored significantly better on a vocabulary test than those who did not, but there was evidence for differential item functioning. (25 references)…

Native Speakers of English and Dutch teachers of English judged the English pronunciation of two Dutchmen, resulting in a fairly large area of consensus. In a second experiment, native English speakers and Dutch speakers of English judged the English pronunciation of both experienced and inexperienced Dutch speakers of English. (15 references)…

Tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for three adult learners with advanced proficiency in English. Four kinds of words were measured for knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and meaning. (Author/JL)

Native and experienced nonnatives listened to a text while performing a concurrent task. Half of each group was given the topic of the passage. Scores on the concurrent task were compared with baseline to index working memory (WM) consumption. Results showed greater WM consumption for nonnatives than natives when the topic was unavailable,…

Investigates whether knowing more than one language enhances the learning of lexical items and syntactic constructions in other languages. Multilingual (M1) students outperformed unilinguals in both types of acquisition, suggesting that M1s' heightened metalinguistic skills, enhanced lexical knowledge, and a less conservative learning procedure…

From perspective of a psycholinguist, discusses three leading questions that have arisen from foundational, descriptive second-language-acquisiton studies: Why are certain L2 constructions learnable and others not?; In considering input requirements, is it fair to say that adult learners can take advantage of metalinguistic information about the…

To understand students' reaction to feedback, path analysis was used to generate models of student writing activity. Results suggest that Taiwan business English writing students may implement proofreading and self-directed redrafting behaviors aimed towards improving their writing when objective sentence-level error feedback is supplied with no…

Visual information from the face is an integral part of speech perception. Additionally, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in nonnative speech. This study investigates the effect of audiovisual speech information and orthography on nonnative speech. Particularly, orthographic depth is of interest. Turkish transparent…

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension items, which elicit specific bottom-up and top-down strategies, favor certain linguistic/cultural groups. Verbal report data were collected from Arabic- and Mandarin-speaking English as a second language (ESL) learners to identify the reading strategies involved in…

This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests multiplechoice, translation, or recall, which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that…