This study examines the perception of English vowels by native speakers of Italian. In two preliminary experiments, Italian university students who had lived in Canada for 3 months were found to have difficulty discriminating because they often identified both members of each contrast as instances of a single Italian vowel. The participants in two other experiments, long-time residents of Canada, were assigned to groups based on their age of arrival in Canada from Italy (early vs. late) and percentage of first language (L1) use (high L1 use vs. low L1 use). Experiment 3 focused on the discrimination of , and experiment 4 examined the discrimination of correct from incorrect realizations of . In both experiments, the early learners obtained higher discrimination scores than the late learners, and low-L1-use participants obtained higher scores than high-L1-use participants. Most important, the early learners who used Italian often (early high), but not the early learners who used Italian seldom (early low), were found to differ from native speakers of English in perceiving English vowels. These results suggest two important conclusions regarding second language (L2) perceptual learning: Learning an L2 in childhood does not guarantee a nativelike perception of L2 vowels, nor does the establishment of a sound system for the L1 preclude a functionally nativelike perception of L2 vowels. Another important finding is that, although the late learners generally perceived English vowels less accurately than the early learners, some perceived them accurately.This study was supported by grant DC00257 from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders. The authors thank J. Prosperine and M. Pearse for help locating participants, Fr. M. Brodeur of St. Anthony's Church in Ottawa, Ontario, and all the participants. The authors are grateful to D. Meador and T. Piske for help preparing the stimuli used in experiment 4. Finally, thanks are extended to K. Aoyama, S. Imai, K. Tsukada, T. Piske, and three anonymous SSLA reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Recently, several studies in SLA (e.g., for discourse, Alanen, 1995; Leow, 2001b; Rott, 1999; for problem-solving tasks, Leow, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2001a; Rosa & Leow, in press a, in press b; Rosa & O'Neill, 1999) have addressed the operationalization and measurement of attention (and awareness) in their research methodology. Studies have employed think-aloud protocols to gather concurrent, on-line data on learners' cognitive processes while they interacted with L2 data. However, the issue of reactivity—the act of thinking aloud potentially triggering changes in learners' cognitive processes while performing the task—has not been empirically addressed in the SLA field. The present study empirically addresses the effects of thinking aloud during the reading process on learners' comprehension, intake, and controlled written production. Participants were first-year college-level students of Spanish exposed to the same passage, pretest, and posttest assessment tasks but differed on type of condition (±think aloud). Results indicate that reactivity does not play a significant role in learners' subsequent performances.We would like to especially thank the SSLA statistician and our own statistician Dr. Rusan Chen for improving the statistical section of our study.

Building on previous studies of the effects of planning on second language (L2) learners' oral narratives and drawing on Kellog's (1996) model of writing, this article reports a study of the effects of three types of planning conditions (pretask planning, unpressured on-line planning, and no planning) on 42 Chinese learners' written narratives elicited by means of a picture composition. The results show that, whereas pretask planning resulted in greater fluency (syllables per minute, p < .01) and greater syntactic variety (number of different verb forms, p < .01), the opportunity to engage in unpressured on-line planning assisted greater accuracy (error-free clauses, p < .05). It is proposed that the two types of planning impact on different aspects of L2 writing processes, with pretask planning promoting formulation and unpressured on-line planning providing better opportunities for monitoring. Writers in the no-planning condition were faced with the need to formulate, execute, and monitor under pressure, with negative consequences for the fluency, complexity, and accuracy of the written product in comparison to the planning groups.The authors would like to thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers of an earlier version of this article for their perceptive and constructive criticism.

This study examines the acquisition of English syllable codas by two native speakers of Vietnamese. Data were collected at three intervals over 1 year. Results indicate that a developmental sequence may exist and that this sequence may not be linear, with some longer (i.e., two and three member) codas emerging before some singleton codas. Furthermore, it was found that production type (e.g., with epenthesis or feature change) differed significantly by coda type and was indicative of acquisition processes. Finally, linguistic environment (preceding and following) and grammatical conditioning were found to significantly affect coda production and development.The author would like to thank Jun Liu, Mary Zampini, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

In their introduction, Piller and Pavlenko claim that SLA research suffers from:

an almost ubiquitous gender-blindness due to the prevalence of psycholinguistic and Universal Grammar approaches … which assume a generic language user and disregard individual variation as “noise,” a distraction which cannot be avoided but which cannot in any way contribute to our understanding of the universal facts of SLA. (p. 3)

New directions for research in L2 writing presents 12 state-of-the-art studies of second language (L2) writing processes. In their introduction to this thoughtfully designed volume, the editors pose two questions to frame the book's psycholinguistic orientation: (a) How are cognitive demands on writing processes made in L2? and (b) How do L2 writing, L2 acquisition, and first language (L1) knowledge interact? The second chapter, a critical analysis of current research on cognitive processes in L1 and L2 writing, comprehensively prefigures the present volume's methodological and theoretical themes. Authors Roca de Larious, Murphy, and Marín synthesize a wide band of research on factors influencing L1 and L2 writing development, laying the groundwork for the remaining 10 chapters.

From the title of this book, one might expect a review of English teaching methodologies. Although teaching methods are discussed, the book actually sets out to define English as an international language (EIL), as opposed to a second or foreign language (L2), and through this lens, carefully reexamines every aspect of English teaching and learning.

Bernard Dov Spolsky is certainly deserving of a festschrift honoring his work: His career, which has taken him from New Zealand to Australia, to Israel, and to Canada and the United States, and back again to Israel, is one that has made a huge impact on the field of educational linguistics broadly conceived. His work includes major contributions with respect to Maori and Navajo educational programs, bilingual education in North America, and issues related to language policy studies and minority language education around the world. His commitment to issues of social justice and equity is well known and well articulated in his work and in his life, and this commitment is also clearly reflected in the contributions to this volume.

Savignon's goal for this volume is to describe various “initiatives, projects, and activities” that seek to make language teaching communicative in the broad sense (p. ix). Interestingly, half of the pages that follow the introductory chapter are devoted to projects in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), and the three articles from the American context have either a primarily theoretical focus or a report on innovation through technology. The remaining contribution reports on a project in the Netherlands to increase autonomy on the part of second language learners. The overarching motif of the volume is that of innovation and its dependence on specific contextual conditions, with a recurring theme being the difficulty of effecting significant change in teacher behaviors.

This heterogeneous collection is dedicated to the extensive contributions of van Essen to language pedagogy, among them nearly a half century of publications listed in the book's dedication. The volume comprises 25 contributions by 31 colleagues who collaborated with van Essen during the span of his career, and they are divided into four parts: the history of linguistics, essays (position papers), studies, and reports.

This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing (John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora (Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena (John said that Mary was sick)—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.

This book presents a syntactic analysis of predicate types in Spanish and English and two psycholinguistic experiments on unaccusativity in these languages. Assuming the minimalist framework (Chomsky, 1995), Sanz proposes a parametric account of how event types are syntactically and morphologically encoded in Spanish and English. In chapter 1, Sanz argues that unaccusative verbs and other predicate types (transitive and unergatives) map onto different action types (activities, accomplishments, achievements, and states) in phrase structure. These event types, or Aktionsart, are encoded in the features of a functional projection Event Phrase. The features of this projection vary in Spanish and English. In Spanish, the projection has uninterpretable features and interpretable telicity features, which are checked overtly in the syntax by the clitic se, as in constructions like Juan se tomó una cerveza “Juan drank a beer” or El barco se hundió “The boat sank.” In English, the Event Phrase lacks uninterpretable features. Consequently, it has semantic content but is syntactically inactive. English calculates telicity in a projection within the VP called Transitive Phrase, where the features [±measure] are checked.

What characterizes the competence of multilinguals as compared to that of bilinguals? Is their metalinguistic awareness more developed? Do they find the acquisition of a fourth or fifth language easier? Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner have assembled revised papers from the 1999 International Conference on Trilingualism and Third Language Acquisition in Innsbruck to present theoretical and practical dimensions of an unexplored domain, still grounded in bilingualism studies.

This book examines the acquisition of verb placement in Swiss German. In Swiss German, as in the case of German and other verb-second languages, the finite verb occurs in the second position (i.e., C position) in matrix clauses but in the final position in embedded clauses, although verb movement in certain embedded contexts such as complements of bridge verbs and indirect questions is optionally permitted. The child Swiss-German data, collected by the author, come primarily from two children—Moira (age: 3;10–6;01) and Eliza (age: 3;10—6;01)—who were acquiring the Lucerne variant of Swiss German. A positive aspect of this research is that it is based on a vast amount of spontaneous production data gathered longitudinally as well as on elicited data. These data are supplemented by data elicited experimentally from Moira's peers in her kindergarten class in Lucerne. A significant finding of Schönenberger's research is that children acquiring the Lucernese variant of Swiss German make a high number of verb placement errors in embedded clauses, in striking contrast to what has been observed in the case of children acquiring German. Specifically, the two children in Schönenberger's study move the finite verb in any type of embedded clause even when there is an overt complementizer present in these clauses. Although the embedded clauses produced by the Lucernese children do not match those in the adult grammar, Schönenberger argues convincingly that their underlying grammar is only minimally different from that of the adult grammar.

Phonetics belongs to the Oxford series entitled Introduction to language studies edited by H. G. Widdowson. Widdowson states in the preface that the purpose of this series is “not to supplant but to support the more academically oriented introductions to linguistics: to prepare the conceptual background” by providing “a general context in reference to which detail makes sense” (p. vii). The book is divided into four sections: a survey, which is written to be readable and informative; a collection of readings extracted from the specialist literature, which extends the concepts presented in the survey; a list of references; and a glossary, which is cross-referenced to the survey.

Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its 842 languages among its roughly 3.8 million inhabitants, constitutes the most linguistically complex society in the world. Of the various lingua francas used in PNG for communication among speakers of different languages, the English-based Melanesian pidgin Tok Pisin—originally brought to PNG in the late 1800s by New Guinean laborers from plantations on Samoa—has become a national language and one of the most widely used language varieties in the country. As a pidgin, it is mostly used as a second language (L2), although it is increasingly becoming a native language (L1) of many younger generation speakers. This nativization of Tok Pisin has been less an object of study than its use as a lingua franca.

Birch's volume on how first language (L1) features such as its orthographic system, phonology, or morphology exert a significant influence on an ESL/EFL reader's performance is an invaluable contribution to the complex and complicated issue of assisting learners of other languages (particularly those from languages with different writing systems) in the process of becoming more efficient and effective readers. This book is relevant to “all ESL and EFL practitioners … teaching illiterate people to read in English or to those whose students already know how to read in their native language” and to “reading researchers, curriculum designers and material writers” including “teachers-in-training” (p. x).

This book is part of a fresh and lively series on bilingual education and bilingualism. It deals with immersion in general but adds its own evidence and contributes substantially to knowledge in the field. Its originality lies in its emphasis: Whereas most of the literature on immersion deals with outcomes, de Courcy focuses on the process, particularly from the perspective of the learner. The research methods are tailored to the research aims. Rather than providing quantitative data, the author emphasizes various types of qualitative data, such as taped interviews, videotapes, student journals, and the researchers' log books. Introspective accounts are central to the discussion, and the importance of an ethnographic approach is also stressed: Observation alone is not enough, and the learners are seen as informants. Another interesting aspect of the book is that, whereas much of the literature on immersion studies is on English and French, here we have much-needed evidence from another language group, Chinese. The research is carried out in Australia with late immersion learners.

Publications received.