A growing body of evidence demonstrates that individual differences in declarative memory may be an important predictor of second language (L2) abilities. However, the evidence comes from studies using different declarative memory tasks that vary in their reliance on verbal abilities and task demands, which preclude estimating the size of the…

The present study investigates bilinguals' capacity to rapidly establish memory traces for novel word forms in a second language (L2), as a function of L2 linguistic proficiency. A group of Chinese-English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were presented with a reading-aloud task, consisting of 16 pseudowords and 16 English words…

Using advanced quantitative methods, this article demonstrates that cumulative exposure to the school language is the best language experience predictor of proficiency in that language (as indexed by sentence repetition, lexical semantic, and discourse semantic tasks) in a highly diverse group of 5- to 7-year-old bilingual children in monolingual…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as a form of implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such implicit aptitude explains some variance in L2 speech perception and production among adult learners with different first language…

Response time variability and its changes over time have been interpreted as indicative of levels of knowledge automatization. Predominantly, only declines in variability have been examined over the course of practice and growing second language proficiency. We discuss possible scenarios that may involve increasing, rather than declining…

Evidence for the role of procedural memory in second language (L2) acquisition has emerged in our field. However, little is known about the reliability and validity of the procedural memory measures used in this research. The present study (N = 119) examined the reliability and the convergent and discriminant validity of three assessments that…

Previous research identified that studying texts in a second language (L2) as opposed to the first (L1) results in substantially weaker recall. We hypothesized that use of advance organizers (AOs) might attenuate this L2 recall cost by supporting L2 users in the construction of more solid memory representations. One hundred Dutch-English…

In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

This study examined how discriminability and prototypicality of nonnative phones modulate the amplitude of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential. We hypothesized that if a frequently occurring (standard) stimulus is not prototypical to a listener, a weaker predictive memory trace will be formed and a smaller MMN will be…

Prior research has found reduced emotionality with foreign language use, especially with single words, but what happens if emotionality is conveyed throughout a longer text? Does emotionality affect how well we remember and associate information, that is, content learning? We played participants descriptions of two invented countries and tested…

The main purpose of the current study was to examine the relative significance of vocabulary knowledge (VK) and syntactic knowledge (SK) in second language (L2) listening ability, while accounting for the effect of several cognitive and affective factors. A total of 263 English-as-a-foreign-language learners took a standardized listening test…

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…

Language-analytic ability, or the ability to treat language as an object of analysis and arrive at linguistic generalizations, is at the core of the constructs of language learning aptitude and metalinguistic awareness, which are implicated in our ability to learn explicitly. In the context of child second language (L2) learning, it has been…