This study examined the second language (L2) acquisition of the Korean plural marker -"tul" by native speakers of English. Seventy-seven learners at four Korean proficiency levels along with 31 native Korean-speaking controls completed five tasks designed to probe for knowledge of particular features and restrictions associated with so-called…

This study examined lexical-phonological interactions in the first 50 words of a group of monolingual German- and Spanish-speaking children and bilingual German--Spanish children. The phonological characteristics of the earliest target word forms and output patterns of these children were analyzed to determine whether bilingual children select…

Infants across cultures need to identify the characteristics of their native languages in order to become competent speakers. The means by which Spanish-speaking children learn to produce number-gender linguistic markers has not been sufficiently investigated. Thirty-eight three-year-olds were tested in Berko-like production tasks, in which they…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

In three experiments, we examine the effects of semantic context and word concreteness on the mapping of existing meanings to new words. We developed a new-word-learning paradigm in which participants were required to discover the meaning of a new-word form from a specific verbal context. The stimulus materials were manipulated according to word…

Finding the match between individuals and educational treatments is the aim of both educators and the aptitude-treatment interaction research paradigm. Using the latent growth curve analysis, the present study investigates the interaction between the type of explicit instructional approaches (deductive vs. explicit-inductive) and the level of…

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the factors affecting the language, speech intelligibility, speech production, and lexical tone development of children with hearing loss who use spoken languages other than English. Relevant studies of children with hearing loss published between 2000 and 2011 were reviewed with reference to…

This paper explores whether English-Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking…

This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

Cross-linguistic transfer studies began from linguistic aspects of language learning and moved to non-linguistic aspects. The intriguing question is whether students are aware of the nature of these cross-linguistic interactions in their minds. For this purpose, a semi-structured interview was conducted with four Iranian university students. It…

This paper presents a discussion about the terms of address used mainly in Libyan Arabic, and how they are similar and/or different from the terms used in other Arabic societies. In addition, the current paper describes how the use of such terms is determined by various social factors and perceptions, and how it is emphasized that these titles…

I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a MAXIMUM ENTROPY phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of…

There has been considerable research in Chinese as a second language (L2) in recent years, particularly in its morphological and syntactic aspects. This article reviews research in these aspects with reference to the broader discipline of second language acquisition (SLA) and suggests that L2 Chinese research has contributed to SLA through…

We applaud Stoel-Gammon's (this issue) call for a more comprehensive account of the relationship between lexicon and phonology, and we strongly endorse her suggestions for future research. However, we think that it will not be enough simply to integrate findings and methods from the adult-centered and child-centered literatures. Both of these…

This article addresses age-related attainment effects in second language acquisition, posing the question of whether such effects are to be explained in terms of a Critical Period with a predictable and abrupt offset point or in terms of the impact of a wider range of factors. It attempts to explore this question by focusing on four discussion…