This paper supports the view that language instruction should be evidence and principle-based. Key facts about second language acquisition will be presented highlighting the main implications for language instruction. A principled and evidence-based approach to language instruction is one which takes into consideration the following: (i) a clear…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual…

An important issue in theories of word learning is how abstract or context-specific representations of novel words are. One aspect of this broad issue is how well learners maintain information about the source of novel words. We investigated whether listeners' source memory was better for words learned from members of their in-group (students of…

We investigated whether bilinguals' integration of a code-switch during real-time comprehension, which involves resolving among conflicting linguistic representations, modulates the deployment of cognitive-control mechanisms. In the current experiment, Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 48) completed a cross-task conflict-adaptation paradigm that…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

This dissertation investigates how English-speaking second language (L2) learners of Mandarin perceive, process and learn Mandarin lexical tones. While most languages use modulations in pitch (intonation) to convey meanings at the phrasal and sentential levels, a number of languages, including Mandarin, also use suprasegmental features such as…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Listening comprehension is a real-time process, yet very little is known about the variables affecting real-time second language (L2) listening. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of syntactic complexity and word frequency on L2 listening. Furthermore, the role of the listener's working memory capacity in listening comprehension…

This study investigated whether Chinese--Korean bilinguals can use structure-based information to interpret Korean sentences containing floating numeral quantifiers during online processing. A numeral quantifier in Korean can be stranded from its modified noun through scrambling as long as the quantifier forms a constituent with the noun. For…

Purpose: From a psycholinguistic perspective, the quality of the stored word form in the phonological input lexicon, as well as its effective retrieval from the phonological output lexicon, is of great importance in lexical processing. This study aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of (a)typical word form processing in primary school children.…

Integrated test tasks, such as listening-to-speak or reading-to-write, are increasingly used in second language assessment despite relatively limited empirical insights into what they assess. Most research on integrated tasks has primarily focused on the productive skills involved; studies exploring the receptive skills mostly investigated tasks…

In a variety of domains, adults who are given input that is only partially consistent do not discard the inconsistent portion (regularize) but rather maintain the probability of consistent and inconsistent portions in their behavior (probability match). This research investigates the possibility that adults probability match, at least in part,…

This study addressed the potential methodological issues effect of attentional condition on subsequent vocabulary development from a different perspective, which addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research that have been based on psycholinguistic notion of second language learner as a limited capacity processor. The…