The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals.…

Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second…

Non-native speakers' sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

The present study investigated the effects of two types of core-image-based basic verb learning approaches: the learner-centered and the teacher-centered approaches. The learner-centered approach was an activity in which participants found semantic relationships among several definitions of each basic target verb through a picture-elucidated card…

It has been well learnt that a large number of Arab EFL learners encounter a considerable degree of complexity in the use of tense and aspect as fundamental components of the English language. Such a degree of difficulty is perceived and experienced by those learners at their different levels of learning English starting at the primary level up to…

This study examined the responses of 39 first-year, 63 second-year, 20 third-year, and 19 fourth-year US college learners of German when they were asked what forms of L2 grammar they, respectively, find particularly difficult; do not expect to ever acquire fully; and believe are not necessary for self-expression. Nominal morphology--particularly…

The pronunciation of regular past tense verbs seems to be difficult for most L2 learners, especially in L2 learners whose first language phonological system is different from the English one. It is predicted that Thai EFL students could encounter difficulties perceiving English coda clusters like the '-ed' ending sounds. For this reason, this…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

The present study investigates whether the implementation of a dictogloss task within a proactive Focus on Form approach (e.g., Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998) has significant effects on the acquisition of Spanish present subjunctive. A total of sixty-six learners in a fifth-semester Spanish course participated in the study and were assigned to…

Second language acquisition research on the immersion context has focused primarily on study abroad, revealing the extent to which that context promotes learners' developing linguistic and intercultural competence. However, little research has examined linguistic development in intensive, domestic immersion contexts. This study investigated the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N = 50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of…

Textual manipulation is a common pedagogic tool used to emphasize specific features of a second language (L2) text, thereby facilitating noticing and, ideally, second language development. Visual input enhancement has been used to investigate the effects of highlighting specific grammatical structures in a text. The current study uses a…

This study compares learners' writing in an impromptu, timed writing (ITW) exam and in a process-based, timed writing (PBTW) exam to investigate the differences between these two types of assessments. A secondary objective of this study is to examine the test takers' attitudes towards the two exams. Forty participants taking ESL writing classes…

This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how…