This aptitude-treatment interaction study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit cognitive abilities are differentially related to learning outcomes under two corrective feedback conditions. One hundred and thirteen intermediate English learners of Spanish were randomly assigned to an implicit feedback (recast), explicit feedback…

Following calls for more modality-sensitive perspectives of SLA, this study investigated the extent to which (a) producing the second language (L2) in the oral modality impacts learner-generated noticing and L2 development of grammatical structures embedded in subsequent auditory input, and whether (b) engaging in L2 production and input…

The present study examined whether early immersive L2 exposure in a foreign language learning context can yield long-term advantages in L2 morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Participants were 40 Korean university students with high English proficiency, who had either attended an English kindergarten or begun learning English in a classroom, and a…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

This study assessed the extent to which captions, textually unenhanced and enhanced, can draw learners' attention to and promote the acquisition of a second language (L2) grammatical construction. A pretest-posttest-delayed posttest experimental design was employed. Seventy-two Korean learners of English were randomly assigned to an enhanced…

This study critically examined the previously reported partial independence between second language (L2) accentedness (degree to which L2 speech differs from the target variety) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding). In prior work, comprehensibility was linked to multiple linguistic dimensions of L2 speech (phonology, fuency, lexis,…

Timed grammaticality judgment tests (TGJT) and oral elicited imitation tests (OEIT) are considered reliable and valid measures of implicit linguistic knowledge, but studies consistently observe better performances on the TGJT than the OEIT due to the different types of processing they require: comprehension for the TGJT and production for the…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005) accounts for the emergence of grammatical forms and structures in comprehension. Sixty-one learners of English participated in oral interviews that elicited a variety of structures relevant to PT. Learners were divided into two groups: those who…

The current project examined whether and to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defined as the first intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, can be predictive of the end state of postpubertal L2 oral proficiency attainment. Data were collected from 88 experienced Japanese learners of English and two groups of 20 baseline…

This study investigates whether gestures can be used during recasts to enhance the saliency of a target structure (locative prepositions) and to lead to better production of the target structure. Forty-eight low-intermediate English as a second language (ESL) students partook in communicative activities during which they received either no…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

Form-focused instruction studies generally report larger gains for explicit types of instruction over implicit types on measures of controlled production. Studies that used online processing measures--which do not readily allow for the application of explicit knowledge--however, suggest that this advantage occurs primarily when the target…

This study investigates the relationship between foreign language aptitude and the learning of two English structures defined as easy or difficult to learn. Using a quasiexperimental design, 66 secondary-level learners of English as a foreign language from three intact classes were provided with four hours of instruction on the "passive"…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…

Meta-analytic research suggests an edge of explicit over implicit instruction for the development of complex L2 grammatical structures, but the jury is still out as to which type of explicit instruction--"deductive" or "inductive," where rules are respectively provided or elicited--proves more effective. Avoiding this…