In five experiments, we examined cross-language activation during speech production in various groups of bilinguals and trilinguals who differed in nonnative language proficiency, language learning background, and age. In Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5, German 5- to 8-year-old second language learners of English, German-English bilinguals,…

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners' interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

This study reports the results of an interpretation task that captures whether high proficiency heritage language (HL) learners of Russian converge with monolingual (L1) speakers or proficiency-matched foreign language (L2) learners in their interpretation of aspectual pairs and whether the absence of convergence arises in the lexical component of…

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a…

The paper presents findings of primary school children's performance on classification and generalisation tasks to demonstrate the fundamental connection between their verbal thinking processes and problem-solving, on the one hand, and the practical activities of their society and culture, on the other. The results reveal that, although children…

This paper reports on a focused investigation into the immediate effects of oral narrative task repetition by two adult EFL learners of intermediate and high proficiency. Two participants performed a narrative speaking task after watching a cartoon video clip and repeated their performance three times, followed by a retrospective report in an…

Research has demonstrated that focused perceptual training facilitates L2 learners' segmental perception and spoken word identification. Hardison (2003) and Motohashi-Saigo and Hardison (2009) found benefits of visual cues in the training for acquisition of L2 contrasts. The present study examined factors affecting perception and production…

Odlin (2003) observes that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the importance of L1 transfer in second-language acquisition (henceforth SLA). To test whether L1 transfer is a significant factor in SLA of English relative clauses (RCs), an English-language acceptability judgment task (AJT) with a four-point rating scale was…

Many learners of a foreign language (L2) struggle to correctly pronounce newly learned speech sounds, yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. Here we explored how a training study of learning complex consonant clusters at the very onset of L2 acquisition can inform us about L2 learning in general and individual differences in particular.…

This study examined the abilities of young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to identify quickly new words from a nonostensive, indirect teaching context (known as fast- mapping) and their ability to commit the words to memory. Seventy-five fourth-grade EFL learners heard novel words embedded in sentences. They were then tested for…

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of…

This study investigates the acquisition of verb placement by Moroccan and Turkish second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Elicited production data corroborate earlier findings from L2 German that learners who do not produce auxiliaries do not raise lexical verbs over negation, whereas learners who produce auxiliaries do. Data from elicited…