Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

This established text--now revised and updated--reveals how spoken language skills are acquired and how they affect children's later reading and writing achievement. With a unique focus on the needs of educators, the book examines the foundations of language in the developing brain. It explores the relationship of language processes to core…

Acoustic and perceptual studies investgate B2-level Polish learners' acquisition of second language (L2) English word-boundaries involving word-initial vowels. In production, participants were less likely to produce glottalization of phrase-medial initial vowels in L2 English than in first language (L1) Polish. Perception studies employing word…

Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their explanations. Hoey's…

Two series of experiments investigate two hypotheses that may explain a conflict regarding pronomial reference. The hypothesis accepted is that the use of the gender cue is under the reader's strategic control; the hypothesis rejected is that implicit causality and gender cue interact differently with the complexity of the inference needed to link…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…

A discussion of language testing looks at the relationship between the processes of language learning and language testing, particularly from the point of view of pragmatics theory. It outlines some of the theory of Charles Sanders Pierce and its role in the evolution of linguistic theory, as well as the work of other theorists concerning the…

Children with specific language impairments (eight learning Italian, eight learning English as a first language) were studied for grammatical deficits. Italian-speakers used noun inflections, verb inflections, copula forms more than English-speaking counterparts, matched by utterance length. Articles were used similarly. Results were consistent…

The Language Aptitude Symposium papers include: "Prognostication and Language Aptitude Testing, 1925-62" (Bernard Spolsky); "You, the Government, and Language Aptitude" (Government Roundtable; abstract only); "Styles of Thinking and Learning" (Robert Sternberg); "Current Research in Measuring Listening"…