This paper reports on an experiment investigating the acquisition of Spanish, a language that has a gender feature for nouns and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives, by speakers of a first language (L1) that also has gender (French), as well as an L1 that does not (English). Number (present in all three languages) is also investigated. Subjects were adult learners of Spanish, at three levels of proficiency, as well as a control group of native speakers. Oral production data were elicited. Subjects were also tested on an interpretation task, in which the selection of pictures corresponding to particular sentences depends on number and gender contrasts. The results from both tasks show significant effects for proficiency; low proficiency groups differ significantly from native speakers, but advanced and intermediate groups do not. There were no significant effects for L1 or for prior exposure to another second language with gender. The findings are discussed in the context of two different theories as to the possibility of parameter resetting in nonnative acquisition, namely, the failed functional features hypothesis and the full transfer full access hypothesis. The results are consistent with the latter hypothesis.

This study investigated the role of awareness in different learning conditions in relation to second language (L2) development. Adult learners of Spanish were exposed to past conditional sentences in one of five versions of a computerized problem-solving task that vary in their degree of explicitness. By employing both on-line and off-line data elicitation procedures, two main issues were addressed: whether exposure to L2 input under different conditions had a differential impact on learners' awareness and whether different levels of awareness influenced learners' ability to recognize and produce new exemplars of the target structure immediately after exposure to the input and over time. Results indicated that higher levels of awareness were not only associated with more explicit conditions but were also substantially more effective than lower levels.

A recent large-scale study identified a subgroup of children with autism who had a language profile similar to that found among children with specific language impairment (SLI), including difficulties with nonsense word repetition, an ability that has been implicated as one clinical marker for SLI. A second clinical marker for English-speaking children with SLI is high rates of omission of grammatical morphemes that mark tense in obligatory contexts. This study used experimental probes designed to elicit third person and past tense morphology with a large heterogeneous sample of children with autism. The subgroup of children with autism who were language impaired showed high rates of omission of tense marking on the experimental tasks. In addition, some of the children with autism made performance errors that were specific to the autistic population, such as echolalia. These findings further refine the characteristics of language impairment found in a subgroup of children with autism.

In a series of lexical priming experiments we examined the interaction between spelling processes dedicated to spelling familiar words (lexical processes) and those dedicated to spelling unfamiliar words or nonwords (sublexical processes). Participants listened to lists of intermixed monosyllabic words and nonwords and were required to spell only the nonwords. In the priming condition, nonwords were preceded by real word primes that were phonologically related to the nonwords. In two experiments, we found that the spellings of nonwords could be influenced by previously heard rhyming words, replicating previous work. Furthermore, we examined the mechanism of this lexical/sublexical interaction and found that it is both phonologically and orthographically based and that word primes are most effective when they overlap in word body (vowel+coda) with the nonword. We conclude that lexical and sublexical processes interact in a manner that involves a dynamic updating of sound–spelling correspondences, which, at a minimum, are specified in terms of the word body.

This study investigated hemispheric lateralization of Mandarin tone. Four groups of listeners were examined: native Mandarin listeners, English–Mandarin bilinguals, Norwegian listeners with experience with Norwegian tone, and American listeners with no tone experience. Tone pairs were dichotically presented and listeners identified which tone they heard in each ear. For the Mandarin listeners, 57% of the total errors occurred in the left ear, indicating a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage. The English–Mandarin bilinguals exhibited nativelike patterns, with 56% left-ear errors. However, no ear advantage was found for the Norwegian or American listeners (48 and 47% left-ear errors, respectively). Results indicate left-hemisphere dominance of Mandarin tone by native and proficient bilingual listeners, whereas nonnative listeners show no evidence of lateralization, regardless of their familiarity with lexical tone.

A total of 130 young adults and 173 older adults gave goodness of fit ratings for sets of word alternatives for 123 English sentence frames. Word alternatives were semantically plausible in all cases but varied in the likelihood of their occurrence within the sentence frames. Adding support to the general belief that vocabulary and language knowledge are well preserved in normal aging, our results showed generally high agreement in goodness of fit ratings by the young and older adults. Differences that did occur appeared to be due to cohort differences in word usage and interests rather than underlying cognitive function. We suggest that this similarity in semantic judgments may help to explain why adult age differences in comprehension and memory for sentences are generally smaller than age differences for other examples of episodic memory.

Based on Bates and MacWhinney's competition model, the present study aims to examine the effects of discourse context on sentence interpretation. In my previous study it was found that both Chinese and English monolinguals paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as the determinants for Chinese and English sentence processing. The conclusions obtained in that study have to be considered tentative because the contextual sentences were short and might not have been sufficiently biasing toward the intended interpretation. Hence, the present study was undertaken to further examine the context effects by elaborating the contents of the contextual sentences. The results show that English native speakers rely on discourse context in interpreting their native language to a greater extent than the previous research has suggested and that Chinese native speakers make use of context information to a greater degree than do their English counterparts.

Two studies examined individual cognitive differences affecting the acquisition of second language word forms. Experiment 1 measured 40 undergraduates' ability to learn phonological sequences, their phonological short-term store capacity as indexed by ability to repeat nonwordlike nonwords, and their learning of novel foreign language vocabulary (German) in an experimental task. Phonological sequence learning predicted receptive vocabulary learning. Phonological sequence learning and phonological store capacity made independent additive contributions to productive vocabulary learning. Experiment 2 determined the interactions of phonological sequence learning ability, phonological store capacity, and second language acquisition during a longitudinal field study of 44 novice undergraduate learners of Spanish during a 10-week course. Students' initial skill in phonological sequence learning predicted their final levels of Spanish receptive language and their eventual ability to repeat Spanish-wordlike nonwords. The results suggest that phonological store capacity and phonological sequence learning ability are initially separable constraints on second language vocabulary acquisition and that sequence learning ability underpins the acquisition of long-term phonological knowledge. Subsequent apprehension and consolidation of a novel word form is a product not only of phonological short-term store capacity but also of this long-term knowledge of the phonological regularities of language.

Two competing explanations exist regarding the nature of morphological difficulty in adult second language acquisition: competence deficit versus performance deficiency. This study tested these explanations by examining English as a second language (ESL) learners' morphological performance in reading comprehension tasks. Chinese ESL speakers were asked to read English sentences for comprehension in three self-paced word by word reading experiments. Their reading times were measured to determine if they were sensitive to idiosyncrasies/disagreement in sentences that do and do not involve the number morpheme. The results show that they are not sensitive to number disagreement, but sensitive to other idiosyncrasies tested. This insensitivity to the number morpheme suggests that their morphological knowledge is not an integrated part of their automatic second language competence.

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