Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

The process of word recognition can be analytic (or serial) or holistic (or parallel). They differ in the size of the processing units (lexical vs. sublexical) or in whether sublexical units are processed sequentially or simultaneously. First language (L1) reading development has been found to involve a transition from serial processing to…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

Within the same learning context, learners' outcomes in terms of oral fluency vary greatly. This study tracked the relative contributions that first language (L1) and initial second language (L2) fluency skill and working memory (WM) made to L2 fluency development. We assessed the performance of French-speaking Grade 6 learners' (n = 47, mean age:…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and…

The present study investigates the multiple constraints on the processing of English dative alternation by Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. The intermediate and advanced learners completed an acceptability judgment task which was composed of 30 dative alternations selected from a spoken corpus. The results showed that the…

Writing is a complex task that requires the activation and coordination of several processes. In addition to the research on the domain-specific factors that contribute to school achievement, there is an increasing interest on general variables, such as mindfulness. Here, we aimed to test the contribution of middle-grade students' trait…

Language abilities in preschool years, including those measured with letter knowledge, are predictors of reading development in later school years. The aim of this study was to investigate variation in children's language abilities before they started school in relation to gender and neighborhood level socioeconomic status (SES). Schools from…

Purpose: There is conflicting evidence regarding effects of bilingualism on inhibition, and the mechanisms that might underlie the effects remain unclear. A prominent account views additional demands on structural language use in bilinguals as being at the root of bilingual effects on inhibition. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that…

The acquisition of a sound system is an integral component of second language (L2) communication, yet it is one of the most difficult skills to teach and is therefore largely ignored in L2 classrooms (Derwing, 2010). In laboratory settings, phonetic training studies have typically examined syllables, rather than words, with no referential meaning.…

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the…

Metalinguistic awareness (MLA) is a predictor of adult foreign language (FL) learning in instructed settings. Following Bialystok and Ryan (1985) two-component model of MLA, we distinguish ML analysis as the ability to compare and select language items from ML control as the ability to detect and manipulate rule-based linguistic patterns. So far,…

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…