This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

Distributional learning is typically understood as (unattended) tracking of stimulus probabilities. Distributional training with speech yields mixed results and the influencing factors have not yet been fully investigated. This study explored whether prior linguistic experience could have an effect on distributional learning outcomes. Czech and…

This study employed a multisite design to investigate the differential impact of deductive and guided inductive instruction for second language (L2) grammar development in ecologically valid classroom contexts. Students (n = 138) from eight intact third-year L2 Spanish classes in three public high schools in the United States received deductive…

The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co-occurrences of multiple words) is related to first language (L1) raters' intuitive judgments of second language (L2) speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by 85 Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were…

To date, a growing number of studies have shown that domain-general auditory processing, which prior work has linked to L1 acquisition, could explain various dimensions of naturalistic L2 speech proficiency. The current study examined the generalizability of this topic to L2 speech learning in classroom settings. The spontaneous speech samples of…

This study presents a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of how 108 high school students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms enhanced the comprehensibility of their second language (L2) speech according to different motivation, emotion, and experience profiles. Students' learning patterns were primarily associated with their…

Can an early learned second language influence speech production after living many years in an exclusively monolingual environment? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of discontinued early bilingualism in heritage speakers who moved abroad and switched language dominance from the second to the primary learned language. We used…

In bilinguals and second language learners, the native (L1) and nonnative (L2) languages coexist and interact. The L1 influences L2 production via forward transfer, as is seen with foreign accents. However, language transfer is bidirectional: even brief experience with an L2 can affect L1 production, via backward transfer. Here, we review the…

This study examined the relationship between external language behavior in the form of intensity of verbal interaction between the learner and his language environment and the effects of this interaction on language abilities as measured by language tests. The subjects were adult learners of English as a second language. (CFM)

The same semantic strategies for requesting are available in Spanish and English. Bilingual children use more polite strategies in speaking Spanish and more neutral ones in speaking English. (PMJ)