The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Effects of phonetically variable input (PVI) for processing instruction (PI) training and the number of training items were tested with a picture-selection eye-tracking task. Intermediate second language (L2) learners of French (n = 174) were tested before and after they received either a short (24 items), medium (48), or long (96) training on the…

The study investigates whether comprehension of derived words in text context requires a complete understanding of word parts. It explores comprehension of derived words as a function of learner proficiency and contextual clues. Ninety English-as-a-foreign-language learners at three proficiency levels participated in three successive tests…

The present study investigates how L2 learners adapt their production preferences following immediate and cumulative experience with a syntactic structure when an L2 structure differs from an L1 structure in terms of verb subcategorization frame and argument structure. Korean learners of English described causative events in English in a…

This study investigates the extent to which (a) Spanish heritage (HL) and second language (L2) writers' linguistic complexity differs across register contexts and (b) Spanish proficiency and writing motivational beliefs differentially affect HL and L2 writers' performance. Participants were 58 HL and 54 L2 Spanish learners who completed two…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

Research on intelligibility in international encounters has long focused on issues of pronunciation to the detriment of factors such as linguistic co-text and extralinguistic context, which are comparatively well-studied variables in intelligibility research concerning L1 listeners. This paper seeks to expand the scope of international…

The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive…

Measures of syntactic complexity such as mean length of T-unit have been common measures of language proficiency in studies of second language acquisition. Despite the ubiquity and usefulness of such structure-based measures, they could be complemented with measures based on usage-based theories, which focus on the development of not just…

Referential expressions (REs) have been investigated in L2 English but to date there is no single study that systematically and simultaneously analyzes the development and acquisition of the multiple factors that constrain the choice of REs in natural discourse production. We investigate L1 Spanish-L2 English learners across three proficiency…

This study explored the interaction between learning conditions, linguistic complexity, and first language (L1) syntactic transfer in semiartificial grammar learning by conceptually replicating and extending Tagarelli et al. (2016). We changed the L1 background, elicited production data during debriefing, and added a binary mixed-effects logistic…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

This study investigates the validity of syntactic priming as a measure of implicit language aptitude. Syntactic priming refers to the tendency to reproduce a linguistic structure due to a previous exposure to the structure. The validity of the construct was verified by collating evidence for divergent validity--whether it is dissociable from…

The present study examined whether early immersive L2 exposure in a foreign language learning context can yield long-term advantages in L2 morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Participants were 40 Korean university students with high English proficiency, who had either attended an English kindergarten or begun learning English in a classroom, and a…