The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the…

This investigation examines English as foreign language college interdisciplinary and intercultural differences in learning strategy use and their implications for language processing. Positivism underpins this research at the levels of ontology (standardized variables), epistemology (detachment from the subjects) and methodology, using nomothetic…

This paper reports on part of the first phase of a longitudinal project investigating the development of academic language in English as the Language of Teaching and Learning (LoLT) by Foundation phase learners in two different educational contexts. In the first context, the learners were all English additional language (EAL) learners taught by…

This study explores the nature of orthographic processing skills among French-speaking children in Grades 6 and 8 who are learning English at school as a second language (L2). Two aspects of orthographic processing skills are thought to form a convergent construct in monolingual beginning readers: word-specific knowledge (e.g. "rain-rane") and…

Natural language makes considerable use of recurrent formulaic patterns of words. This article triangulates the construct of "formula" from corpus linguistic, psycholinguistic, and educational perspectives. It describes the corpus linguistic extraction of pedagogically useful formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing. It determines…

Input exposure is essential for nonprimary language learning, but the importance of explicit instruction and corrective feedback continues to be debated. If instruction is required, how might it be optimized in terms of its nature and timing? In this study, 65 Spanish-English bilinguals were introduced to Latin through an interactive computer…

This paper contributes to the literature on the transferability of grapho-morphological awareness (GMA) for second language (L2) learners by analysing L2 learners' knowledge of morphology in reading. GMA helps readers to identify grammatical categories, infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and access stored lexical information. Previous research…

The present study investigates transfer effects in two groups of German learners of French for ambiguous relative clause (RC) constructions. The first learner group had started to learn French before English, whereas the second group had started to learn English before French. The RC attachment ambiguity is interesting to study possible transfer…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

In this paper we present an unsupervised neural network model of bilingual lexical development and interaction. We focus on how the representational structures of the bilingual lexicons can emerge, develop, and interact with each other as a function of the learning history. The results show that: (1) distinct representations for the two lexicons…

This study examines the linguistic complexity and lexical diversity of both overt and covert L2 output produced during synchronous written computer-mediated communication, also referred to as chat. Video enhanced chatscripts produced by university learners of German (N = 23) engaged in dyadic task-based chat interaction were coded and analyzed for…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…

This study employed an artificial language learning paradigm together with a combined behavioral/event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neurocognition of the processing of gender agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology that is problematic in adult second language (L2) learning. Subjects learned to speak and comprehend an…

This dissertation investigates the neural and behavioral correlates of grammatical agreement computation during language comprehension in native English speakers and highly advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals. In a series of electrophysiological (event-related brain potential (ERP)) and behavioral (acceptability judgment and self-paced…

Word association responses in first-language (L1) Spanish and second-language (L2) English were investigated by means of response latencies and types of associative response produced. The primary aims were to establish whether (a) some response types are produced more often or faster than others, (b) participants' L2 response time profiles mirror…