This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in the PI group heard sentences with monotone prosody. The effects of training were assessed through an offline comprehension task, a written production task, and an online self-paced reading (SPR) task. The results for the offline tasks showed that the groups were similar with respect to their offline comprehension and production. The SPR task showed that both groups used case markers to interpret word order online to some extent; however, only the PI+P group did so in all conditions. These results suggest that prosody does play a role in (morpho)syntactic processing, and that covert activation of prosodic structures can facilitate processing during online reading tasks.

This six-volume, beautifully bound, boxed set contains 112 reprinted papers covering the history and development of modern theoretical pragmatics from its beginnings back in the 1940s and '50s with Charles Morris, Rudolf Camap, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, via the major works in the 1970s of those such as Stalnaker, Bach and Hamish, J. L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice, to the more recent contributions of, among many others, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, François Recanati, and Anna Wierzbicka. The bulk of the contributions, either free-standing papers or sections from books, come out of what one might term a philosophical approach to pragmatics, but toward the end of the collection there is an attempt to cover more ethnographically rooted approaches and even to get into applied pragmatic issues related to aphasia, first language acquisition, second language acquisition (one paper), and politics.

PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT IN A SECOND LANGUAGE. Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. x + 352. $36.95 paper.

The goal for this useful volume is to survey and evaluate research on pragmatic development of second language learners. In the first chapter, Kasper and Rose note that numerous studies in crosscultural pragmatics assess nonnatives' language use and contrast it with the performance of natives but that relatively few studies have focused on how language learners' pragmatic abilities change and develop over time. For researchers in SLA, however, this question of development is central.

This edited volume consists of 20 chapters, and all but 3 are written in Spanish. The chapters are grouped under four major sections: the classroom, the standard language, teaching language through culture, and political aspects of the maintenance of Spanish. Each section is preceded by an overview.

INPUT AND EVIDENCE: THE RAW MATERIAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Susanne E. Carroll. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xviii + 462. $114.00 cloth.

The ambitious goal of this book is the exposition of “a truly explanatory theory of SLA” (back cover). Such a theory is bound to be multifaceted and complex, and indeed, Carroll draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks in exploring the relationship between input—or more precisely, the nature of the mechanisms brought to bear in processing language stimuli—and the nature of the language knowledge that (adult) second language (L2) learners ultimately acquire. In other words, a theory of acquisition must be integrated with a theory of speech processing to explain how language stimuli are transformed into abstract mental representations; this book represents Carroll's attempt to construct just such a model.

This special issue has attempted to ascertain the universal applicability of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977) by extending previous research in this area, which has focused on English and a few other European languages, to East Asian languages. To this end, five empirical studies have been reported; these studies yielded mixed results with regard to their support for the NPAH. Overall, what is striking to me in these results is the fact that despite the expectation of some researchers to find robust counterevidence to the NPAH, many of these studies ended up finding at least partial support for the NPAH, even in East Asian languages.

BEYOND NATURE-NURTURE: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF ELIZABETH BATES. Michael Tomasello and Dan Slobin (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. ii + 339. $89.95 cloth.

This volume has been compiled both to review and assess Bates's contribution to the field of child language and to demonstrate that her influence and the ideas she stimulated live on and are being pursued by her colleagues. After an introduction by the editors, a brief compilation of some of Bates's aphorisms—for which she was justifiably famous—and her full curriculum vitae, the volume is divided into five parts, each of which addresses one of Bates's interests.

We present a learner corpus-based study of English article use (“a”/“the”/Ø) by L2 learners with four typologically distinct first languages (L1s): German and Brazilian Portuguese (both have articles), Chinese and Russian (no articles). We investigate several semantic and morphosyntactic factors—for example, specificity, prenominal modification that can affect article use. Our analysis of 660 written scripts from the Education First Cambridge Open Database confirms the lower overall accuracy of learners with no-article L1s. Our main finding is the differential effect of specificity on definite and indefinite articles: learners tend to associate specificity with “a,” which implies article omission with nonspecific indefinite singulars and overuse of “a” with specific indefinite mass nouns. Prenominal modifiers further contribute to perceived specificity, leading to article overuse with modified indefinite mass nouns. However, in definite contexts, prenominal modifiers are associated with increased article omission.

This study presents a conceptual replication of Birulés et al.’s (2020, Experiment 2) investigation of native and nonnative listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth with the goal of better understanding the potentially modulating role of proficiency in listeners’ reliance on audiovisual speech cues. Listeners’ eye gaze was recorded while watching two short videos. Findings from one of the videos replicated results from the original study, showing greater attention to the talker’s mouth among L2 than L1 listeners. In both videos, L2 proficiency modulated attention, with more fixations on the mouth among lower proficiency listeners, an effect predicted but not observed in the original study. Collectively, these laboratory-based findings highlight the role of visual speech cues in L2 listening and present evidence that listeners with more limited proficiency may be especially reliant on such cues. These observations warrant future investigations of the benefits of visual speech cues in instructional and assessment contexts.

There has been increasing interest in the effects of note taking in second language (L2) research. However, no meta-analysis has been conducted to examine the relationship between note taking and learning through exposure to L2 input. We retrieved 28 effect sizes from 21 studies (N = 1992) to explore the overall effects of note taking as well as to examine the extent to which the effectiveness of note taking is likely to vary as a function of a set of potential moderators (i.e., learner variables, treatment variables, note-taking features, learning target, and measurement type). Results revealed that note taking had a small to medium positive overall effect on learning through exposure to L2 input (g = 0.56, 95% CI: 0.24–0.88). Subsequent moderator analyses revealed that variability in the size of note-taking effects across studies was explained by learner variables (context, region, orthographic scripts, institutional level), treatment variables (mode of input, material type), note-taking features (note-taking behavior, number of note-taking sessions, provision and type of note-taking strategy instruction, total length of instruction, opportunity to review notes), learning target, and measurement type. Based on the obtained findings, teachers are recommended to incorporate note taking in L2 classrooms. Pedagogical suggestions and directions for future research are also provided.

Promoting autonomy and independence (A & I) has for years been an accepted goal of Western education in general and has more recently joined such aims as developing “communicative competence” or using “authentic materials” in the canons of second language teaching and learning. As is the case with other pedagogical bandwagons we have jumped aboard, too little attention has been paid to its underlying theoretical bases and assumptions, and too few calls for empirical evidence of learning outcomes have been made. Benson and Voller offer a thought-provoking collection of papers that, although strongly endorsing the A & I movement in general, bring several of its implicit assumptions and values to conscious scrutiny and explore both apparent paradoxes and issues for debate.

A handful of second/foreign language (L2) studies have examined the effects of practice schedules and reported the advantage of interleaved practice (i.e., practice multiple skills simultaneously) over blocked practice (i.e., practice one skill first and then proceed to the next one). However, no studies in the realm of L2 pragmatics have explored this theme. This study investigated the influence of interleaved corpus-based practice and blocked corpus-based practice on L2 pragmatic development. Sixty-three L2 learners of English from a university in China received instruction on two pragmatic features: suggestions and requests. After the instruction, they were randomly assigned to an interleaved-practice group (n = 31) or a blocked-practice group (n = 32). Results from multimedia discourse completion tasks on the immediate and delayed posttests showed facilitative and long-term effects of interleaved practice on pragmatic accuracy. Moreover, the results revealed positive and durable influence of blocked practice on fluency. Implications are discussed.