In much previous research, listeners' rating data have served as a dependent variable to demonstrate the effects of age of learning, length of residence, and motivation on L2 users' degree of foreign accent. However, the role of speaking rate in such judgments has not been ascertained. To gain new insight into this relationship, we carried out two experiments involving sentence-length utterances produced by English L2 users. In the first, we observed a significant curvilinear relationship between speaking rates and accentedness and comprehensibility judgments of utterances produced by users from a variety of L1 backgrounds. In the second experiment, by manipulating rates with speech compression-expansion software, we established that this effect was due to the rate differences themselves, rather than to differences in L2 proficiency that might co-vary with rate. In both experiments the listeners tended to assign the highest ratings to L2 speech that was somewhat faster than the rates generally used by L2 users; however, both very fast and very slow speech tended to be less highly rated. Researchers who use listener rating data should be mindful of the potential confounding effect of speaking rate in their data.

Reading in a second language (L2) is not a monolingual event; L2 readers have access to their first language (L1) as they read, and many use it as a strategy to help comprehend an L2 text. Owing to difficulties in observing the comprehension process, little research has been conducted to determine what role the L1 plays in the reading strategies of L2 readers. Using think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews with 20 native speakers of Chinese and Japanese at three levels of language proficiency studying in the United States, this study explores further the question of when L2 readers use their L1 cognitive resources and how this cognitive use of the L1 helps them comprehend an L2 text. We conclude by suggesting that the results support a sociocultural view of the L2 reading process.

The present study examines the relationship between second language (L2) proficiency and pausing patterns (i.e., pause duration, frequency, and distribution) in the speech of 30 Russian speakers of English performing two oral tasks—a topic narrative and a cartoon description—in Russian and in English. The subjects were divided into two oral English proficiency groups, high and intermediate, on the basis of a standardized test of spoken English. Baseline data were collected from a control group of 20 native English speakers. Statistical analyses were performed to determine: (a) the native norms of pause duration, frequency, and distribution for Russian and English on the two experimental tasks; (b) the effect of the level of L2 proficiency (high and intermediate) on the pausing of Russian speakers in English; and (c) the differences or similarities in pausing exhibited by native English speakers and native Russian speakers (with two different levels of English proficiency) when speaking English. The results of this study indicate that English and Russian informal monologue speech can be characterized as having different pausing conventions, thus suggesting that crosslinguistic differences involve, among many other aspects, contrasts in pausing patterns. Additionally, L2 proficiency was found to affect the pause duration of advanced nonnative speakers in that they were able to adjust the duration of their pauses in English to produce a nativelike pausing norm. It was also found that even highly proficient L2 speakers pause more frequently in their L2 than in their first language (L1). The examination of pause distribution patterns suggests that persons of intermediate to high L2 speaking proficiency make the same number of within-constituent pauses as native speakers. Overall, the findings of this study support the view that adherence to the target language pausing norms may lead to the perception of nonnative speech as more fluent and nativelike. The findings also highlight the importance of exposing L2 students to a richer variety of situations that illustrate native patterns of verbal communication.

Previous research has suggested that child but not adult immigrants to the United States and Canada make regular progress learning English as their length of residence (LOR) increases. If children and adults received the same kind of second language (L2) input, such evidence would support the existence of a critical period for L2 acquisition. The present study compared groups of Chinese adults living in the United States who differed in LOR in order to assess the role of input in adults' naturalistic acquisition of an L2. We assessed the Chinese participants' identification of word-final English consonants (experiment 1), their scores on a 144-item grammaticality judgment test (experiment 2), and their scores on a 45-item listening comprehension test (experiment 3). The Chinese participants were assigned to one of four groups (n = 15 each) based on LOR in the United States and their primary occupation (students vs. nonstudents). Significantly higher scores were obtained for the students with relatively long LORs than for the students with relatively short LORs in all three experiments. However, the difference between the nonstudents differing in LOR was nonsignificant in each instance. The results suggested that the lack of an effect of LOR in some previous studies may have been due to sampling error. It appears that adults' performance in an L2 will improve measurably over time, but only if they receive a substantial amount of native speaker input.

These two books by Geoffrey Finch are designed to be accessible and practical guides to the study of linguistics. The first book listed (HTSL) introduces the major aspects of linguistic study. After the introductory chapter on how language works and how one can describe language, Finch starts with notions such as linguistic competence and performance and the various functions of language (chap. 2). The next three chapters present the central aspects of the core areas of linguistics: phonetics and phonology (chap. 3), syntax (chap. 4), and semantics and pragmatics (chap. 5). Chapter 6 explores the core areas further by discussing topics such as distinctive feature analysis, intonation, morphology, X-bar theory, and transformational grammar, and then provides a brief introduction to sociolinguistics, stylistics, and psycholinguistics. One interesting feature of this book is that Finch often uses literary work and quotations to illustrate his points in the discussion of linguistic concepts. HTSL ends with a chapter that offers advice on how to write a linguistics essay and is complete with a glossary and an index. At the end of each chapter there is a list of references for further reading, but there are no exercises that one usually expects of an introductory linguistics book.

This book addresses the challenges facing modern language education at the start of the new millennium. Although its focus is the United Kingdom, the concerns delineated resonate on this side of the Atlantic.

Despite the energetically enthusiastic assertions of the publisher and of Piatelli-Palmirini, who offers an extensive foreword beginning “This dialogue is a gem,” I found that this enormous book did not live up to its hype. I was hoping to find an engaging discussion—in a format I liked from the earlier Lasnik and Uriagareka A course in GB syntax (1988)—that would bring me up to date on the Minimalist Program, from a position somewhere mid-GB. However, I rarely felt the dialogue was intended to welcome the uninitiated. First, its style is irritating, with attempts to be cute that just end up being distracting. Second, many parts of the discussion seem much more aimed at colleagues and rivals on the inside than those members of the larger community for whom the book is designed (as suggested, at least, by the blurb). This is particularly a shame, given that Piatelli-Palmirini's preface explicitly says, patronizingly, that the book will be good for those applied linguists who get irritated with constant change in linguistic theory (p. xxxiv).

This volume is a collection of papers, the majority of which were first presented on a colloquium at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in 1997. The volume is dedicated to Charlene Junko (Charlie) Sato, who died in 1996 at the age of 44. Charlie was a political activist in several domains but was perhaps best known in applied linguistics circles for her work in support of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) in communities and schools.

The data that provide the foundation for this investigation of second language (L2) slips of the tongue stem from a corpus originally compiled in 1984 to investigate the use of compensatory strategies by Dutch learners of English. Poulisse defines a slip or speech error as a performance error stemming from a temporary processing problem rather than a competence error reflecting an incomplete or incorrect L2 system. The book's focus is the extent to which research on L2 slips (morphological, phonological, and syntactic) can shed light on speech-production processing for the development of bilingual models of speech production.

This volume, part of a series on research methodologies in second language acquisition (SLA), describes contributions that conversation analysis (CA) makes to the field. Markee argues that CA, which provides microanalyses of moment-by-moment “talk-in-interaction” (Schegloff, 1987), makes visible learners' efforts to speak and understand a new language. He questions the tendency in SLA toward theory-driven and largely experimental research at the expense of theory-building and naturalistic methods.

This book would be a good introduction for teachers who are novices in including the Internet in their language courses. Rather than lengthy explanations of the technical aspects of the Internet, the bulk of this book is devoted to sample classroom activities.

Loritz discusses the nature and evolution of language in the context of a connectionist approach to neural architecture, namely, Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). Given the massive parallel processing inherent to ART, he argues that all of the mechanisms inherent to generative grammar, including discrete rules, stored grammatical representations, and so on, can be dispensed with. Loritz's “adaptive grammar” attempts to derive what have been considered to be grammatical universals from the structure of the human brain, in particular its short-term memory limitations. For example, so-called universal topic-verb order (p. 149) follows from “a deeper biological injunction to say (and do) topical things first, a ‘rule' which applies not just to conversations but to everything brains do. It is a corollary of evolution: the organism that doesn't do relevant things first simply doesn't survive” (pp. 150–151).

Over the past 15 years, a number of acquisition studies have found that young children allow pronouns to take an antecedent within their clause, in violation of Principle B of the binding theory. Thus, unlike adults, they allow him to refer to Nathan in the sentence Nathan praised him. Thornton and Wexler present results of a new experiment testing knowledge of binding within VP ellipsis structures of the form Nathan praised him, and Albert did too. Whereas adults do not allow the pronouns in each conjunct to have different antecedents, some children do. Based on their findings, Thornton and Wexler propose that children's syntactic knowledge is intact (and hence Principle B is being observed) but their pragmatic knowledge is incomplete.

This volume extends the traditional focus of this series on the phonology-phonetics interface with papers exploring the contribution of various types of empirical data—including acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual—to the principal themes embodied in the questions of what constitutes a possible word and what underlies the human capability to produce language.

In this latest volume of the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series, Winston has included not only discourse analysis of American Sign Language (ASL) but also of sign languages native to Bali, Italy, and England. She offers a fascinating look at the “intricate discourse patterns that have evolved in different languages” (p. ix). Her work should be required reading for all teachers of sign language as well as teachers of interpreters. This book will also appeal to sociolinguists; language use in the community is clearly the overriding theme.

Pragmatic meaning and cognition provides an analysis of pragmatic meaning that is grounded in general cognitive linguistics. It makes use of the specific framework of “experiential realism” as put forth in the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which views language as a representation of reality as it is perceived and experienced by human beings. As such, experiential realism stands in contradistinction to an objectivist framework in which language is a symbolic representation of objectively existing reality. Marmaridou's overarching goal is to demonstrate how sociocultural aspects of pragmatic meaning are integrated into cognitive structure rather than being external to it.