Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish around age 14 years. They were compared with native ...

This study investigated how vowel epenthesis, a typical suprasegmental error produced by Japanese learners of English, is realized in their speech production of L2 English. We investigated two aspects: (i) whether loanword epenthesis phonology in Japanese transfers to English speech production, and (ii) how learners’ English proficiency level affects vowel epenthesis. In Japanese loanword phono...

Learner corpora consist of texts produced by second language (L2) learners. I We present ALeS Ko, a learner corpus of Chinese L2 learners of German and discuss the multi-layer annotation of the left sentence periphery notably the Vorfeld.

A goal of second language (L2) learning is to enable learners to understand and speak L2 words without mediation through the first language (L1). However, psycholinguistic research suggests that lexical candidates are routinely activated in L1 when words in L2 are processed. In this article we describe two experiments that examined the acquisition of L2 lexical fluency. In Experiment 1, two gro...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

This study was an attempt to explore the role that the increased perceptual saliency of L2 input features or output flaws and hereby promoting L2 learners’ noticing (through planned instructional activities) can play in the learners’ use of correct English intonation patterns. The participants were 80 Iranian EFL students attending four intact classes, two low-intermediate and two upper-interme...

BACKGROUND This study examines the role of decoding and vocabulary skills as longitudinal predictors of reading comprehension in young first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. METHODS Two-group latent growth models were used to assess differences in growth and predictions of growth between the 198 L1 and 90 L2 language learners. RESULTS L1 learners had better initial reading comprehens...

Studies of language development suggest that child learners nearly always reach an error-free stage in the acquisition of grammar whereas adult learners who reach an error-free proficiency level are rare. Moreover, children achieve this “perfect” stage seemingly effortlessly and quickly unlike adults. One explanation for these differences comes from an idea of an innate language device which is...

Theory strongly suggests that L2 perception is influenced by the L1. More recently, it has also been proposed that L2 vocabulary size may be related to the perception of non-native phones. Japanese (JP) learners of Australian English (AE) identified AE vowels using JP vowel categories and provided goodness-of-fit ratings. Results show systematic perceptual assimilations of L2 to L1 vowels and l...