Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

This paper makes a strong connection between the need for innovation in second language pedagogy and the need for language teachers to develop a good understanding of how language develops in our minds/brains. The future for innovative language pedagogy requires that language teachers fully develop the following: (i) a working definition of the…

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of…

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals' linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in…

This paper presents an experimental study of the rarely explored question of how input through instruction interacts with L2 acquisition at the level of modular linguistic knowledge. The investigation focuses on L2 knowledge of the English polarity item "any," whose properties are only partially covered by typical language-teaching…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

Although cross-linguistic research on second language tense-aspect acquisition has uncovered universal tendencies concerning the association between verbal semantics and tense-aspect markers, it is still unclear what mechanisms underlie this link. This study investigates the acquisition of two imperfective aspect markers ("-ko iss-" and…

This study investigates relations between second language (L2) lexical input and output in terms of word information properties (i.e., lexical salience; Ellis, 2006a). The data for this study come from a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic spoken data between L2 learners and first language (L1) interlocutors collected over a year's time. The…

Young English-speaking children often omit auxiliary verbs from their speech, producing utterances such as "baby crying" alongside the more adult-like "baby is crying." Studies have found that children's proficiency with auxiliary BE is correlated with frequency statistics in the input, leading some researchers to argue that…

A growing research line documents significant bivariate correlations between individual measures of speech perception gathered in infancy and concurrent or later vocabulary size. One interpretation of this correlation is that it reflects language specificity: Both speech perception tasks and the development of the vocabulary recruit the…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

After discussing the ties between language teaching and second language acquisition research, the present paper reviews the role that second language acquisition research has played on two recent pedagogical proposals. First, communicative language teaching, advocated in the early eighties, in which focus on the code was excluded, and then the…

Variations in the amount and nature of early language to which children are exposed have been linked to their subsequent ability (e.g. Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer & Lyons, 1991; Hart & Risley, 1995). In three computational simulations, we explore how differences in linguistic experience can explain differences in word learning ability due…