This study examined the abilities of young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to identify quickly new words from a nonostensive, indirect teaching context (known as fast- mapping) and their ability to commit the words to memory. Seventy-five fourth-grade EFL learners heard novel words embedded in sentences. They were then tested for…

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of…

This study investigates the acquisition of verb placement by Moroccan and Turkish second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Elicited production data corroborate earlier findings from L2 German that learners who do not produce auxiliaries do not raise lexical verbs over negation, whereas learners who produce auxiliaries do. Data from elicited…

This paper analyzes two recent Korean immigrants' ESL learning motivation using Dörnyei's (2009, The L2 motivational self-system. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.), "Motivation, language identity and the L2 self," pp. 9-42) Second Language (L2) Motivational Self-System, which is synthesized with Engeström's (1999, "Activity…

This dissertation investigates whether and how learners' heritage language (HL) background and explicitness of feedback influence second language (L2) pragmatic development of Korean referent honorifics through conversational interaction. Specifically, this study focuses on HL learners versus non-heritage language (NHL) learners and recasts versus…

While previous research has indicated that learners with field-dependence (FD) and field-independence (FI) cognitive styles benefit differentially from different instructional modes, previous corrective feedback studies have ignored the issue of matching error correction strategies to learners' cognitive style. To shed some light on this issue,…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

This study investigates how inaccurate phoneme processing affects recognition of partially onset-overlapping pairs like "DAFFOdil-DEFIcit" and of minimal pairs like "flash-flesh" in second-language listening. Two cross-modal priming experiments examined differences between native (L1) and second-language (L2) listeners at two…

This study investigates the production and online processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty-nine six- to nine-year-old L2 children and twenty-eight typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production…

Connectives (e.g., although, meanwhile) carry abstract meanings and often signal key relationships between text ideas. This study explored whether understanding of connectives represents a unique domain of vocabulary knowledge that provides special leverage for reading comprehension, and whether the contribution of knowledge of connectives to…

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

Within a variationist approach for data collection and analysis, this study investigates the acquisition in perception of post-vocalic word-final stops (codas) by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese learning English as a foreign language in a classroom environment. Because codas are illicit in this variety of Portuguese, the hypothesis holds that…

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language, studying foreign languages in general and then also studying special fields through the medium of foreign languages may provide an extra difficulty for Finnish students. Most university language centres in Finland have organized reading comprehension courses in several foreign languages for the…