The study examined the predictions of regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000) in relation to task-based incidental vocabulary learning. A total of 189 English as a second language learners completed a vocabulary pretest, a regulatory focus questionnaire, an integrated reading/writing task, and finally an unannounced vocabulary posttest. The participants were randomly assigned to two task conditions. In the gain condition, they started the task with zero points and had to gain 75 points to enter a drawing to win one of three $100 gift cards; in the loss condition, they started with 100 points and had to avoid losing more than 25 points. Multiple regression results partly supported the regulatory fit predictions. Prevention individuals learned significantly more vocabulary items in the loss condition than in the gain condition; but promotion individuals did not learn significantly more vocabulary items in the gain condition than in the loss condition. Theoretical and pedagogical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

The present study explores the incidental learning of formulaic sequences (FS) from audio-visual input and factors affecting the learning of FS. A pretest-posttest, within-participant design was adopted. English-as-a-foreign-language learners (L1 = Dutch; n = 42) watched a one-hour English-language documentary without subtitles. Learning gains were measured at the level of form recall and meaning recall. Significant learning gains were found in both the form recall and meaning recall tests, indicating that several knowledge aspects of FS can be learned incidentally from audio-visual input. The findings also revealed a positive relationship between learners’ prior vocabulary knowledge and the learning gains. Further, several item-related factors affected the learning gains (e.g., collocate-node relationship, frequency). Finally, the findings showed the incremental nature of learning FS, as preknowledge of the meaning of the FS prior to the TV viewing was the strongest predictor of learning the form of FS.

A quarter of a century has passed since complex dynamic systems theory was proposed as an alternative paradigm to rethink and reexamine some of the main questions and phenomena in applied linguistics and language learning. In this article, we report a scoping review of the heterogenous body of research adopting this framework. We analyzed 158 reports satisfying our inclusion criteria (89 journal articles and 69 dissertations) for methodological characteristics and substantive contributions. We first highlight methodological trends in the report pool using a framework for dynamic method integration at the levels of study aim, unit of analysis, and choice of method. We then survey the main substantive contribution this body of research has made to the field. Finally, examination of study quality in these reports revealed a number of potential areas of improvement. We synthesize these insights in what we call the “nine tenets” of complex dynamic systems theory research, which we hope will help enhance the methodological rigor and the substantive contribution of future research.

Much of the research on L2 article acquisition has investigated the effects of semantic, syntactic, and discourse universals on the systematicity and variability of learners' article use. The present paper looks at systematicity from the combined perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity (e.g., Givón, 1983) that have been addressed only separately in past studies of article acquisition: the tendency to mark the distinction between topics and comments (e.g., Huebner, 1983) and the tendency to mark the distinction between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents (e.g., Chaudron & Parker, 1990). The present study examines how well these discourse universals account for the patterns of article use and nonuse found in narratives written by 199 Finnish-speaking and 145 Swedish-speaking adolescent learners of English. The quantitative results of the study cast some doubt on learners' sensitivity to the topic-comment distinction and also suggest that learners' tendency to mark distinctions between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents is influenced by the prominence of such distinctions in the L1. The quantitative results are supported by a qualitative analysis of a subset of the data that suggests numerous other elements that are needed to characterize the systematicity of individual learners' interlanguage article systems.

The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native speakers (NSs) of English as well as less of a difference in duration between the two types of vowel than the NSs. The Japanese speakers, whose native language has a phonemic length distinction, produced more nativelike durational patterns. Finally, the vowel quality (first and second formant frequencies) of unstressed vowels was different from the NS group's for the late bilinguals, for whom unstressed vowels were widely dispersed in the vowel space according to their orthographic representations, and from the early Korean bilinguals, who substituted the Korean high central vowel. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of the phonological status of first language phonetic features and age of acquisition.This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation (KRF-2003-042-A00048) and partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (DC05132). A draft of this research was presented at the English phonology workshop division held for the 50th anniversary of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (June 2004). The authors would like to thank four anonymous SSLA reviewers and Jonathan Loftin for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Williams’s (2005) study on “learning without awareness” and three subsequent extensions (Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011; Hama & Leow, 2010; Rebuschat, Hamrick, Sachs, Riestenberg, & Ziegler, 2013) have reported conflicting results, perhaps in part due to differences in how awareness has been measured. The present extension of Williams (2005) addresses this possibility directly by triangulating data from three awareness measures: concurrent verbal reports (think-aloud protocols), retrospective verbal reports (postexposure interviews), and subjective measures (confidence ratings and source attributions). Participants were exposed to an artificial determiner system under incidental learning conditions. One experimental group thought aloud during training, another thought aloud during training and testing, and a third remained silent, as did a trained control group. All participants were then tested by means of a forced-choice task to establish whether learning took place. In addition, all participants provided confidence ratings and source attributions on test items and were interviewed following the test. Our results indicate that, although all experimental groups displayed learning effects, only the silent group was able to generalize the acquired knowledge to novel instances. Comparisons of concurrent and retrospective verbal report data shed light on the conflicting findings previously reported in the literature and highlight important methodological issues in implicit and explicit learning research.

There is growing evidence that L2 learners pick up new words while viewing video but little is known about the role of individual differences. This study explores incidental learning after viewing a French documentary containing 15 pseudowords and investigates whether learning is moderated by participants’ prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory. Sixty-three higher-intermediate learners of French participated in this study. Prior vocabulary knowledge was measured by means of a French meaning recognition test. Participants also took a forward digit-span (phonological short-term memory), a backward digit-span, and an operation-span task (complex working memory). After viewing the video, four surprise vocabulary tests on form and meaning were administered. Results revealed that learning gains occurred at the level of form and meaning recognition. Vocabulary knowledge was positively related to picking up new words from video. Complex working memory correlated with the recognition tests showing more incidental learning gains for learners with higher complex working memory.

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, intermediate English-Spanish learners rely more on salient adverbs than on less salient verb inflections, but it is not clear whether this preference is a result of a default or a L1-based strategy. To address this question, 120 English (poor morphology) and Romanian (rich morphology) learners of Spanish (rich morphology) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 in the case of the monolinguals) containing adverb-verb and verb-adverb congruencies or incongruencies and chose one of four pictures after each sentence (i.e., two that competed for meaning and two for form). Eye-tracking data revealed significant effects for (a) sensitivity (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), (b) cue location in the sentence (participants spent more time at their preferred cue, regardless of its position), (c) L1 experience (morphologically rich L1 learners and monolinguals looked longer at verbs than morphologically poor L1 learners and monolinguals), and (d) L2 experience (low-proficiency learners read more slowly and regressed longer than high-proficiency learners). We conclude that intermediate and advanced learners are sensitive to tense incongruencies and—like native speakers—tend to rely more heavily on verbs if their L1 is morphologically rich. These findings reinforce theories that support transfer effects such as the unified competition model and the associative learning model but do not contradict Clahsen and Felser’s (2006a) shallow structure hypothesis because the target structure was morphological agreement rather than syntactic agreement.

Twenty years ago, a state-of-the-art review in SSLA marked the coming of age of the study of temporality in second language acquisition. This was followed by three monographs on tense and aspect the next year. This article presents a state-of-the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research addressing the aspect hypothesis (AH) (Andersen, 1991, 2002; Andersen & Shirai, 1994, 1996), the most tested hypothesis in L2 temporality research. The first section of the article gives an overview of the AH and examines its central tenets, and then explores the results of empirical studies that test the hypothesis. The second section considers studies that have investigated four crucial variables in the acquisition of temporality and the testing of the AH. The third section discusses theoretically motivated areas of future research within the framework of the hypothesis.

This study critically examined the previously reported partial independence between second language (L2) accentedness (degree to which L2 speech differs from the target variety) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding). In prior work, comprehensibility was linked to multiple linguistic dimensions of L2 speech (phonology, fluency, lexis, grammar) whereas accentedness was narrowly associated with L2 phonology. However, these findings stemmed from a single task (picture narrative), suggesting that task type could affect the particular linguistic measures distinguishing comprehensibility from accentedness. To address this limitation, speech ratings of 10 native listeners assessing 60 speakers of L2 English in three tasks (picture narrative, IELTS, TOEFL) were analyzed, targeting two global ratings (accentedness, comprehensibility) and 10 linguistic measures (segmental and word stress accuracy, intonation, rhythm, speech rate, grammatical accuracy and complexity, lexical richness and complexity, discourse richness). Linguistic distinctions between accentedness and comprehensibility were less pronounced in the cognitively complex task (TOEFL), with overlapping sets of phonology, lexis, and grammar variables contributing to listener ratings of accentedness and comprehensibility. This finding points to multifaceted, task-specific relationships between these two constructs.

This study focuses on beginning second language learners’ attention to irregular verb morphology, an area of grammar that many adults find difficult to acquire (e.g., DeKeyser, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2010). We measured beginning learners’ eye movements during sentence processing to investigate whether or not they actually attend to irregular verb features and, if so, whether the amount of attention that they pay to these features predicts their acquisition. On the assumption that attention facilitates learning (e.g., Gass, 1997; Robinson, 2003; Schmidt, 2001), we expected more attention (i.e., longer fixations or more frequent comparisons between verb forms) to lead to more learning of the irregular verbs. Forty beginning learners of German read 12 German sentence pairs with stem-changing verbs and 12 German sentence pairs with regular verbs while an Eyelink 1000 recorded their eye movements. The stem-changing verbs consisted of six a → ä changing verbs and six e → i(e) changing verbs. Each verb appeared in a baseline sentence in the first-person singular, which has no stem change, and a critical sentence in the second- or third-person singular, which have a stem change for the irregular but not the regular verbs, on the same screen. Productive pre- and posttests measured the effects of exposure on learning. Results indicate that learners looked longer overall at stem-changing verbs than regular verbs, revealing a late effect of verb irregularity on reading times. Longer total times had a modest, favorable effect on the subsequent production of the stem vowel. Finally, the production of only the a → ä verbs—not the e → i(e) verbs—benefited from direct visual comparisons during reading, possibly because of the umlaut in the former. We interpret the results with reference to recent theory and research on attention, noticing, and language learning and provide a more nuanced and empirically based understanding of the noticing construct.

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.

This article surveys the development of second language (L2) phonology over the last 40–50 years. Research in this area has grown from analyzing learners' errors in terms of Contrastive Analysis to proposals explaining L2 sound patterns in terms of constraints on interlanguage grammar. Although native language transfer has endured as one source of learner constraints, researchers have, over the years, shown the necessity of phonological universals in explaining L2 phonologies. More recently, L2 phonologists have provided insightful analyses through constraint-based grammars within the framework of Optimality Theory.I would like to thank two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. As always, neither of these people is responsible for any misstatements, misrepresentations, or other errors.

This paper examines the sources of miscommunication in a videotaped tutoring session involving a native speaker of Korean and a native speaker of U.S. English. Analysis revealed an initial nonmutual interpretation of participant role and status. These divergent interpretations appear to have resulted from the Korean tutor's transfer of a Korean conversational routine, which he defined as involving polite speaker modesty, to the U.S. English context. The initial conflicting interpretations are maintained and solidified by additional mismatches in discourse management strategies, schema, and contextualization cues. The cumulative effect of these mismatches was the judgment on the part of each of the interlocutors that the other was uncooperative.

This meta-analysis investigated the overall effects of glossing on L2 vocabulary learning from reading and the influence of potential moderator variables: gloss format (type, language, mode) and text and learner characteristics. A total of 359 effect sizes from 42 studies (N = 3802) meeting the inclusion criteria were meta-analyzed. The results indicated that glossed reading led to significantly greater learning of words (45.3% and 33.4% on immediate and delayed posttests, respectively) than nonglossed reading (26.6% and 19.8%). Multiple-choice glosses were the most effective, and in-text glosses and glossaries were the least effective gloss types. L1 glosses yielded greater learning than L2 glosses. We found no interaction between language (L1, L2) and proficiency (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and no significant difference among modes of glossing (textual, pictorial, auditory). Learning gains were moderated by test formats (recall, recognition, other), comprehension of text, and proficiency.

This study examined the effect of choice on EFL learners’ task engagement. Twenty-four Thai university students completed two opinion-gap tasks. In one, they discussed and agreed on three items among given options (+constraint). In the other, they discussed and agreed on three items among the options they generated (−constraint). Spoken interaction and questionnaires were analyzed for behavioral (time on task, words produced, turns), cognitive (negotiation of meaning and form, self-repairs), social (overlaps and turn completion, backchannels), and emotional engagement (anxiety, enjoyment), based on Philp and Duchesne’s multifaceted model. The −constraint task had positive effects on all the cognitive engagement measures, but only one of the behavioral measures (turns) and one of the social measures (overlaps). Learners reported higher anxiety and enjoyment in the −constraint task. The findings highlight the interrelated multidimensional nature of learner task engagement while suggesting pedagogical implications and avenues for future research.

The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA—specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate syntactic and pragmatic or discursive knowledge, an interface at which L2 learners have been shown to encounter difficulties (e.g., Sorace, 1993; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). The data come from (a) an 8.5-hr corpus that consists of recordings of 10 dyadic conversations between near-native and native speakers of French and (b) two contextualized paper and audio tasks that tested intuitions and preferences regarding LD. Analyses of the near-native speakers’ production of LDs, the syntactic properties of their LDs, and their use of LDs to promote different types of discourse referents to topic status suggest that their mastery of this aspect of discourse organization converges on that of native speakers.

In this paper, various definitions of markedness are discussed, including the difference in the assumptions underlying psychological and linguistic approaches to markedness. It is proposed that if one adopts a definition derived from theories of language learnability, then the second language learner's prior linguistic experience may predispose him or her towards transferring marked structures from the first language to the second, contrary to usual assumptions in the literature that suggest that second language learners will avoid marked forms. To test this hypothesis, adult and child learners of French as a second language were tested using grammaticality judgment tasks on two marked structures, preposition stranding and the double object construction, which are grammatical in English but ungrammatical in French, to see if they would accept French versions of these structures. It was found that the second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in French but did accept the double object construction, suggesting that transfer takes place only with one of the two marked structures. In addition, the children took tests on these structures in their native language to see if they perceived them as in any sense psycholinguistically marked. Results show that they do not treat marked and unmarked structures differently in the native language. It is suggested that the concept of markedness may cover a range of phenomena that need to be further clarified and investigated.

Building on the cognitive and interactive perspectives of task research, the cognition hypothesis states that increasing task complexity promotes greater interaction and feedback and thus facilitates second language (L2) development (Robinson, 2001b, 2007a). To date, very little research has explored this claim during learner-learner interactions in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom contexts in which a task-based syllabus is implemented. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of task complexity on the occurrence of interaction-driven learning opportunities and question development in such a classroom context. Korean university students (N = 191) from four intact English classes were randomly assigned to one comparison group and three experimental groups with various task-complexity levels (i.e., simple, +complex, and ++complex) based on Robinson’s framework. Their interactions were audiorecorded, and occurrences of learning opportunities, operationalized as language-related episodes (LREs), were identified. Question development was identified between pretest and posttests on the basis of the learners’ stage advancement using Pienemann and Johnston’s (1987) developmental sequence. Results indicated that more complex tasks promoted a greater number of LREs and particularly led to LREs targeting developmentally advanced question structures, which result in question development.