Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

Beginning foreign language (FL) courses in high school often have high numbers of learning disabled (LED) and at-risk students, perhaps because many students who are considered to be college bound begin foreign language study in middle school. This paper examines FL difficulties as well as effective strategies that others have used to conquer…

Reviews research on the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonology, focusing on whether adult learners have access to the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar (UG). It argues that UG is still accessible in L2 phonological acquisition, and parameters can be reset but that the Subset Principle can impede learning success. (51…

A knowledge of areas of difficulty as well as their underlying causes is necessary before instructional materials, teaching techniques, and evaluation methods in foreign language instruction can be organized. This research describes three methods of analyzing the problems in foreign language learning and suggests their complementary role in…

Through an experiment investigating the processes used by several speakers of Asian languages to decode passages by speakers of Australian English, this paper seeks to establish and categorize the types of problems encountered by multilingual speakers when decoding the speech of monolingual speakers in one of their (the multilinguals') second…

The urban, ethnically Hawaiian child typically experiences great difficulty in learning to read English. In order to determine whether phonological confusion is a source of dialectical interference, the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) Phone Discrimination Test (KPDT) was developed for the one hundred twelve students in the KEEP school…