Analysis of college Spanish students' processing of information under different conditions suggested that learners, and particularly early-stage learners, have great difficulty in attending to both form and content. (22 references) (Author/CB)

Examines the processing of Spanish future tense morphology incidentally while reading in a second language. Participants had no previous knowledge of future tense morphology so that, as they read the passage used in the study, they encountered the target form for the first time, which is an accented "a" on the end of an infinitive--for example,…

Reviews the literature on the role of background knowledge in second-language listening comprehension, presents findings of pertinent first- and second-language research, and reports on a study showing the importance of schemata in second-language listening comprehension and the role of linguistic knowledge. (34 references) (Author/CB)

Responses of native and nonnative English speaking undergraduates regarding the grammaticality of sentences with varying object and subject structures demonstrated that native speakers exhibited a processing preference, as did nonnatives whose native language grammar did not bias them toward another certain structure. (19 references) (Author/CB)

Twenty-five advanced Chinese learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) provided grammaticality judents in full-sentence and word-by-word conditions. The results indicated that parsing, and not grammatical competence, is the source of difficulty on performance with subject extraction sentences. Contains 58 references. (MDM)

Explores the relevance of a model for second language (L2) lexical organization and processing, with particular attention to its mental lexicon components, i.e., concepts, lemmas, and lexemes; and organization. Argues that the process of inferring the features of unknown words in a reading passage can be described in terms of lemma construction,…

A study investigated how second language learners responded when native speakers signaled difficulty in understanding them. Types and frequency of learner responses were examined in relation to communication tasks and to native speakers' different signal types. Results supported the construct of comprehensible output, the influence of linguistic…

A study used compressed speech to observe aural processing strategy differences between native English-speakers and high- and medium-level learners of English as a second language. Quantitative and qualitative differences in recall among the three groups were found. (Author/MSE)

The background of word association tests is described, their potential relevance to second language (L2) research considered, and the history of their use as L2 measuring instruments reviewed. A computer-controlled word association test is described. The test was not established as a valid indicator of language proficiency. (Author/LMO)