Syntactic priming studies in second language (L2) have contributed to understanding how L2 speakers' syntactic knowledge is represented and processed. However, little is known about social influences on L2 speakers' syntactic processing and learning. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers' syntactic priming is influenced by social…

Lexical inferencing is considered a listening strategy that is commonly employed by advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listeners and a factor that contributes to successful listening comprehension. However, investigations of the factors that influence inferencing success in listening as well as how much each factor contributes to success…

The aim of this study was twofold: first, to develop an experimental technique as a tool to investigate learning outcomes of spontaneous, naturalistic second language (L2) learning under controlled laboratory conditions; and second, to explore how this technique can be used to understand the basic conditions and limits of this learning. Two…

This study investigates how second language (L2) fluency is influenced by two factors: Pre-task planning and content familiarity. Planning was adopted as a between-participant variable, combined with content familiarity as a within-participant variable, in a 2 × 2 split-plot factorial design. Nineteen measures of fluency phenomena, constituting…

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

Anxiety and L2 self-confidence have been suggested as vital determinants of willingness to communicate (WTC) in a foreign-language (FL) learning environment. Studies also demonstrate that it is a concern over pronunciation mistakes that is particularly likely to cause embarrassment and apprehension in FL students. Linking these two facts may lead…

Change of first language (L1) status from the most stable language to a less accessible language over the life-span of a bilingual individual is termed "language attrition". Such a shift in ease of L1 access has been reported to affect the lexicon (Pelc, 2001) more than other aspects of language. However, whether L1 attrition is affected by…

This article examines alternating verbs (such as "quemar"(se) "to burn") in second language (L2) Spanish by considering the learnability problem from a sequence learning perspective (N. Ellis, 1996, 2002). In Spanish, verbs of the alternating class are obligatorily marked with the clitic "se" in their intransitive form. Errors of omission among…