Speaking a second language (L2) means having acquired a new inventory of phonemes (speech sounds), new words, and new inflectional and syntactic rules. Because this new knowledge must be stored somewhere in the brain, it does not require neuroimaging experiments to conclude that a bilingual speaker’s brain must be in some way different from that of a monolingual speaker. The question is rather:...

since the emergence of the process-oriented approach in second language writing instruction, the issues of writing instruction have been predominantly concerned with what and how error feedback should be given to the students’ writing. the present study investigated the effect of explicit corrective feedback on writing accuracy of iranian intermediate efl learners (n = 44) in hamedan islamic az...

This is the first study on the acquisition of gemination in Arabic, a phonological aspect that is prominent in the adult phonology yet complex in terms of its implementation and interaction with the grammar. The study reports on the longitudinal development of five Lebanese children in the second year of life and enables the authors the trace the transition from phonetic to phonological acquisi...

The purpose of this article is to explore the psycholinguistic aspects of interlingual and intralingual interference during second language grammatical gender production. Two experiments were constructed to explore whether the difficulties in acquisition and correct production of grammatical gender in a second language are influenced by competition for selection between the gender node of a sec...

Recent work on second language (L2) phonological acquisition has argued that the relative ease and difficulty that adult L2 learners encounter with particular novel segments can be attributed to the underlying inventory of phonological features required to represent contrasts in the learner’s first language (L1): segments which present difficulty in acquisition are precisely those whose represe...

The transfer of sound from one language into another is not a uniform process, but rather, takes different forms depending on the orthographies and phonological properties of source and target languages, the less common of which involve processes significantly different from transliteration between European phonetic scripts. This paper pools techniques commonly used in loanword phonology and se...

This article revisits earlier proposals that language learning is, in essence, the learning of formulaic sequences and their interpretations; that this occurs at all levels of granularity from large to small; and that the language system emerges from the statistical abstraction of patterns latent within and across form and function in language usage. It considers recent research in individual d...