Second language (L2) phonological acquisition involves learning novel target-language sounds, variable forms of sounds that arise in different phonological contexts, and any phonotactic constraints that govern their appearance. Interlanguage (IL) grammars must adapt to represent sounds and constraints that are novel to the native language (L1)…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical…

This paper examines the process of acquiring L2s that are closely related to the L1 through data on how adult French speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this L2. We consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the L2 grammar, specifically in the…

The traditional implicit learning literature has focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been recently directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for…

To date, there has been little empirical research exploring the relationship between implicit and explicit lexical knowledge (of collocations). As a first step in addressing this gap, two laboratory experiments were conducted that evaluate different conditions (enriched, enhanced, and decontextualized) under which both adult native speakers…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Moroccan Arabic speakers in order to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and its interaction with Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other hand.…

The article summarizes results from two experimental studies on reactivity. In the first experiment, 24 college-age participants received a computerized treatment that delivered a grammar lesson, practice, and feedback on assignment of semantic functions in Latin. Verbalizations did not induce reactivity on accuracy, but they slowed down posttest…

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times…

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases, using a phrase classification task. Results support a lexical representation hypothesis for the processing of idioms. (Author/AM)