The article summarizes results from two experimental studies on reactivity. In the first experiment, 24 college-age participants received a computerized treatment that delivered a grammar lesson, practice, and feedback on assignment of semantic functions in Latin. Verbalizations did not induce reactivity on accuracy, but they slowed down posttest…

In recent years, researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have become increasingly interested in the implications of sociolinguistic research for L2 learning. Among the many questions that arise are whether the development of sociolinguistic competence should be an instructional goal as early as the beginning level, and what…

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

Lexical access in language production, and particularly pathologies of lexical access, are often investigated by examining errors in picture naming and word repetition. In this article, we test a computational approach to lexical access, the two-step interactive model, by examining whether the model can quantitatively predict the repetition-error…

Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing…

An expression-induction model was used to simulate the evolution of basic color terms to test Berlin and Kay's (1969) hypothesis that the typological patterns observed in basic color term systems are produced by a process of cultural evolution under the influence of biases resulting from the special properties of universal focal colors. Ten agents…

Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n = 1694) and Cantonese (n = 1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from…

The ideology of monolingualism prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic communities who are bilingual and multilingual. Some minority ethnic communities in Britain believe that the response to the dominance of English language is to replace it with other languages. Complementary schools--language and culture classes organised…

Some US researchers and practitioners are calling for the use of written codeswitching in mainstream college courses, despite a strong English-only sentiment among many teachers and the public. This paper describes the existing positions in this debate and presents findings from the author's research to shed light on the debate and make…

Second language research and classroom practice have tended to sideline reading in favor of an emphasis on the oral language development of the English Language Learner (ELL). First-language (L1) reading research is well developed but has limited usefulness to the teacher or researcher interested in second-language (L2) reading. Developing L2…

The ability to perceive and produce sounds at multiple time scales is a skill necessary for the acquisition of language. Unlike speech perception, which develops early in life, the production of speech sounds starts at a few months and continues into late childhood with the development of speech-motor skills. Though there is detailed information…

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…

This study investigated three of the issues recently raised in connection with the traditional concept of foreign language aptitude: the relationship between foreign language aptitude and working memory and phonological short-term memory capacity, the role of foreign language aptitude in predicting success in the framework of focus-on-form foreign…

Little research has been conducted on the development of suprasegmental characteristics of vocalizations in typically developing infants (TDI) and the role of audition in the development of these characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal development of fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) in eight TDI and…