We investigated whether the accuracy of grammatical morphemes in second language (L2) learners' writing is associated with usage-based distributional factors. Specifically, we examined whether the accuracy of L2 English inflectional morphemes is associated with the availability (i.e., token frequency) and contingency (i.e., token frequency…

This study explores the effects of receptive derivational affix knowledge, derivative frequency, part of speech, and vocabulary breadth on production of derivatives. Twenty-one speakers of English as a first language and 107 learners of English as a second language were asked to produce derivatives for 90 prompt words on a decontextualized…

We conducted a multisite replication of Yang and Lyster's (2010) study investigating the effects of recasts and prompts on learning English regular and irregular past tense. Our study was conducted with intact high school and vocational school classes in Italy and Bosnia. Our participants were young adolescents (14-15 and 16-17 years old), a…

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light…

This investigation examined two techniques that may help learners focus on second language (L2) constructions when recasts are provided during meaning-based communicative activities: altering the cognitive complexity of tasks and manipulating the input frequency distributions of target constructions. We first independently assessed the validity of…

This article explores the usage- and exemplar-based roots of second language (L2) negation construction learning. Based on two longitudinal case studies involving two adult L2 English learners and a corpus of 63 three-hour sessions of recorded classroom interactions, the study shows that L2 learning follows the predictions of usage-based models of…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

Some research has posited a natural order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a Second Language. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants--perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a…