This paper concerns the regulation of second language research writing, particularly from the point of view of how English language writing is managed and intervened in. We approach the topic through a case study conducted at a computer science department in a large Nordic university. Drawing on interviews with researchers and administrative staff…

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

The study reported in this article was aimed at investigating whether making the findings of second language fluency research accessible to language teachers has an impact on their self-reported understanding of the concept of oral fluency, confidence in promoting it, and classroom practice in short and medium term. The data come from 106 initial…

This study demonstrates how stakeholders' treatment of English language as the sole marketable/saleable commodity in educational setting can have implications for multilingualism and existing linguistic diversity in Pakistan. Language commodification refers to the valuation of languages as marketable/saleable commodities and their relative…

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This…

Although regularity refers to the compatibility between pronunciation of character and sound of phonetic component, it has been suggested as being part of consistency, which is defined by neighborhood characteristics. Two experiments demonstrate how regularity effect is amplified or reduced by neighborhood characteristics and reveals the…

Purpose: Given the growing prominence of computational modeling in the acquisition research community, we present a tutorial on how to use computational modeling to investigate learning strategies that underlie the acquisition process. This is useful for understanding both typical and atypical linguistic development. Method: We provide a general…

Adequate reporting of quantitative research about language learning involves careful consideration of the logic, rationale, and actions underlying both study designs and the ways in which data are analyzed. These guidelines, commissioned and vetted by the board of directors of "Language Learning," outline the basic expectations for…

This commentary offers a brief reflection on the state of CALL in 1997, when "Language Learning & Technology" was launched with my paper entitled "CALL in the year 2000: Still in search of research paradigms?" The point of my 1997 paper was to suggest the potential value of research on second language learning for the study…

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2…

There has been a great deal of research on first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning through meaning-focused input since Nagy, Herman & Anderson's (1985) seminal study of incidental vocabulary learning through reading. Two strands of research within this area are incidental vocabulary learning through listening and guessing from…

It is a robust finding that ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recent studies (e.g., Rodd et al. in "J Mem Lang" 46:245-266, 2002) now indicate that this "ambiguity advantage" may in reality be a "polysemy advantage": caused by related senses (polysemy) rather than unrelated meanings…

We present a framework of second and additional language (L2/L"n") acquisition motivated by recent work on socio-indexical knowledge in first language (L1) processing. The distribution of linguistic categories covaries with socio-indexical variables (e.g., talker identity, gender, dialects). We summarize evidence that implicit…

A number of previous studies on Chinese relative clauses (RC) have reported conflicting results on processing asymmetry. This study aims to revisit the prevalent debate on whether subject-extracted RCs (SRC) or object-extracted RCs (ORC) are easier to process by using the eye-movement technique. In the current study, the data are analyzed in terms…