Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

While there is a growing body of research on second language acquisition (SLA) in children, adolescents, young and more mature adults, much remains to be explored about how adults in later life learn a new language and how good additional language learning is for them. Our goal in this article is to survey and evaluate what is known about the…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

The longitudinal case study reported here provides some information about early stages of learning ESL and factors affecting language development. Comparison reveals striking similarities to first language acquisition sequences, and therefore a similarity in adult and child learning. (CHK)

Discusses the results of the administration of the SLOPE test, a measure of oral production, to 66 adult speakers of English as a second language. (Author/RM)

A review of research on the development of linguistic competence in second language learners looks at the role played by input to children in their development of linguistic competence, the nature of children's metalinguistic development, and the same processes in the naturalistic second language learning of adults, and then examines the role of a…

This report considers the various facets of metacognition and their relation to adult literacy. The first section provides definitions of literacy and discusses the issue of single versus multiple factor hypotheses. The second section looks at the foundation of research on metacognition and literacy development in children. It examines whether…

This study focuses on the semantic development of individual lexical items, as viewed from a semantic features perspective. It involves four narrow semantic domains, a sample of elementary school-children and their teachers, and two native language groups, English and Spanish. Semantic development is studied through the process of equivalence…

This book on lifelong learning has two overarching themes: the three Rs of learning power (resilience, resourcefulness, and reflectiveness) and a good learner's toolkit of learning strategies. An introduction previews the main conclusions. Chapter 1 explains how different communities can hold different beliefs about learning. Chapter 2 explores…

Discusses the value of classifying the errors adult language learners make and of comparing them to errors made by children. It is suggested that teachers correct student errors in the same way parents correct children's errors in order to encourage successful learning. (CFM)

The language learner is activated by exposure to primary linguistic data in the target language, categorizes that data and deduces from it a system of rules or hypotheses. When the language acquisition process is successful, as is virtually always the case in first language acquisition, the learner's rule system corresponds to that of the speech…