Researchers have claimed that recasts might be ambiguous as feedback. Because recasts serve a dual function, as both feedback and conversational response, learners might not always interpret them as feedback (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997). This study explores how learners interpret recasts they notice (as responses to content, negative evidence, positive evidence, or a combination of negative and positive evidence) and how recast features (linguistic targets, length, number of changes) might affect their interpretations. Forty-nine learners of Japanese engaged in task-based activities during which they received recasts of morphosyntactic and lexical errors. When learners noticed recasts, they occasionally interpreted them as responses to content, particularly when recasts were long and substantially different from their problematic utterances. In contrast, learners were significantly more likely to attend to the linguistic evidence in recasts when these were short and closely resembled the original utterances. These patterns were generally observed for both morphosyntactic and lexical recasts. Results suggest that length and number of changes might, in part, determine the explicitness of recasts as feedback and thus affect learners' abilities to interpret them as such.I am grateful to Alison Mackey, Helen Carpenter, and Ana-Maria Nuevo for their insightful suggestions on an earlier version of this article. I also would like to thank Alison Mackey, Ronald Leow, and Noriko Iwashita for their valuable feedback on the dissertation research on which this study is based, the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, and Brian Marx for his statistical advice. Any errors, of course, are my own. This research was supported in part by a dissertation improvement grant from the National Science Foundation (grant No. 0214188).

It has been observed that there is a strong association between the inherent (lexical) aspect of verbs and the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology (the aspect hypothesis; Andersen & Shirai, 1994). To investigate why such an association is observed, this study examined the influence of inherent aspect and learners' first language (L1) on the acquisition of Japanese imperfective aspect by using two tasks—an acceptability judgment test and an oral picture description task—with two groups of second language learners of Japanese: 26 native speakers (NSs) of English, which has the obligatory progressive, and 35 NSs of languages that have no obligatory progressive marking (German and Slavic languages). The results from the acceptability judgment test support the aspect hypothesis in that, regardless of L1, the imperfective marker -te i-ru was strongly associated with activity verbs for lower proficiency learners. However, the results from the oral task did not support the prediction, in that lower proficiency L1 nonprogressive learners did not show any such preference. The results suggest that L1 plays a role in the formation of the acquisition pattern predicted by the aspect hypothesis, but that given the complex interaction with task types and proficiency, L1 transfer cannot be the sole reason for the predicted association in the acquisition of Japanese -te i-(ru). It is argued that multiple factors are at work when learners create the form-meaning associations predicted by the aspect hypothesis.This article is based on research conducted as part of Sugaya's doctoral dissertation submitted to Ochanomizu University. We would like to thank Kevin Gregg, Yoshinori Sasaki, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. We also thank Manabu Kurosawa for his invaluable advice on statistical analysis. We are grateful to Chie Morizuka, Hiromi Ozeki, Masuyo Sugiyama, Orie Takahashi, Yoko Mukoyama, Yukari Hashimoto, and the other participants of the seminar on SLA at Ochanomizu University for their helpful discussions of this study. We also thank the participants in the study for their cooperation and those who kindly helped us recruit them. This research is partially supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Developmental Index for Japanese L1 and L2 Acquisition and Comparative Research on the Acquisition of English and Japanese, grant No. 13410034, PI-Kiyoshi Otomo, Tokyo Gakugei University). A preliminary analysis of the acceptability judgment test appeared in Nihongo Kyooiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching; Sugaya, 2004).

This article seeks to illuminate the degree of position-based variation observed in the acquisition of new segments in a second language and to explain such variability as the consequence of phonetic constraints; this approach contrasts with much previous research that has used typological markedness to the same end. Specifically, it is proposed that learners will have the least difficulty acquiring sounds that involve novel combinations of voicing and manner in positions that favor the phonetic implementation of these sounds. Moreover, on the assumption that not all parameters can be mastered simultaneously, it is predicted that learners will first acquire aspects of a segment's articulation that are perceptually salient and articulatorily easier. The data come from a study of the acquisition of French by 20 intermediate- and advanced-proficiency English-speaking learners of French. Acoustic analysis of the data reveals asymmetries that favor accuracy with manner in onsets versus more targetlike realization of voicing in codas, in which devoicing exists in the input. Beyond demonstrating the role of phonetic principles in determining position-based variation, the findings contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of new consonantal contrasts by providing empirical evidence from a non-Germanic language to bear on this line of inquiry.

Typological linguistics has made important contributions to our understanding of SLA processes, especially in the early days of SLA research (e.g., Eckman, 1977; Hyltenstam, 1977; Rutherford, 1984). In particular, the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH), originally proposed as a generalization based on typological work by Keenan and Comrie (1977), has served as a basis on which many SLA studies are conducted. The NPAH predicts the ease of relativization as a function of the grammatical role of the head noun phrase (NP) modified by the relative clause (RC) observed in languages of the world: subject (SU) > direct object (DO) > indirect object (IO) > oblique (OBL) > genitive (GEN) > object of comparison (OComp). If a language can relativize on a position on the hierarchy, then it follows that any other higher position (or position to the left in the given schematic) can also be relativized on. For example, if a language has an OComp relative (e.g., the man who I am taller than), then it has a GEN relative (e.g., the man whose father I know) and all of the others higher on the hierarchy (i.e., OBL, IO, DO, and SU).

This study investigates whether second language (L2) phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of nonnative segments by native segments in learners' speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. We adopt a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton's (1975, 1978) gradual diffusion framework. Participants were 40 Quebec Francophones of different English proficiency levels who produced 80 tokens of English in eight phonetic contexts. In Analysis 1, production accuracy data are subjected to implicational scaling, with phonetic contexts ordered solely by a linguistic criterion—sonority hierarchy. In Analysis 2, the production accuracy data are similarly analyzed but with phonetic context ordering determined by psycholinguistic (processing) criteria—cross-language perceptual similarity and corpus-based estimates of lexical frequency. Results support and extend Gatbonton's framework, which indicates that L2 phonological learning progresses gradually, conforming to an implicational scale, and that perceived cross-language similarity and lexical frequency determine its course.This research was made possible through grants to Pavel Trofimovich, Norman Segalowitz, and Elizabeth Gatbonton from the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and support from the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Melanie Barrière and Randall Halter in all aspects of data collection and analysis. Many thanks are extended to Dawn Cleary, Winnie Grady, Eva Karchava, Nootan Kumar, Magnolia Negrete Cetina, and Alin Zdrite for their help in various stages of this study. The authors wish to thank Tracey Derwing and Murray Munro for sharing their speech elicitation materials. Sarita Kennedy, Randall Halter, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers provided helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

The present study utilizes traditional silent reading and a think-aloud procedure to investigate the role of lexical cues to meaning in the incidental acquisition of the Spanish future tense. A total of 161 beginning-level university students of Spanish participated in the study. Two versions of a reading passage that contained 13 target items were created: One version contained a title and lexical temporal indicators (LTIs) in each sentence that contained a target verb, whereas the passage appeared with no title and no lexical cues in the second version. Both procedures employed the same tasks to measure the effects of LTIs on learner comprehension and processing of the 13 novel forms. The tasks were scored and submitted to statistical analysis. Results indicate that for both the silent reading and the think-aloud conditions, LTIs augment learner comprehension and do not detract from learners' noticing of forms. Furthermore, the text interaction format of the think-aloud protocol was found to significantly enhance recognition and production of the previously unfamiliar forms in the input.I wish to thank James F. Lee, who guided me through the realization of this project and continues to provide intellectual support. Additionally, I appreciate the feedback and encouragement provided by Kimberly Geeslin, who read many versions of this article. This investigation was supported by the University of Kansas New Faculty General Research Fund. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their insightful criticisms and comments. All errors are my own.

This study explores the question of whether native and nonnative listeners, some familiar with the language and some not, differ in their accent ratings of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Although a few studies have employed native and nonnative judges to evaluate native and nonnative speech, the present study is perhaps the first to include nonnative judges who were unfamiliar with the language they were judging. This study compares accent ratings of four different groups listening to Brazilian Portuguese spoken by NSs and NNSs. The 25 speakers of Portuguese were 5 NSs and 20 NNSs who were NSs of American English. The four listening groups were (a) Brazilian Portuguese listeners, (b) American English listeners with Portuguese experience, (c) American English listeners without Portuguese experience, and (d) English as a second language listeners without Portuguese experience. Although there were some differences, the results show striking similarities across groups, suggesting that listeners' first and second languages do not strongly affect ratings of foreign accents. The study also has implications for the critical period hypothesis because it raises the possibility that there are salient universal features of nonnative speech.

Although Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) has been shown to predict the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in SLA, most studies of the NPAH have been on European languages. This paper tests the prediction for Japanese. Study 1 analyzes RCs in an oral interview corpus from 90 learners of Japanese at four different levels of proficiency (first language = Mandarin Chinese, English, and Korean; N = 30 for each). Analysis of 1005 RCs from nonnative data and 231 RCs from 15 native speakers (NSs) of Japanese revealed that even lower proficiency learners used direct object (DO) and oblique (OBL) relatives, suggesting that subject (SU) relatives are not easier than DO or OBL relatives for second language learners of Japanese. The learners (except Korean NSs) also made strong associations between SU and animate heads and between DO/OBL and inanimate heads. Study 2 employed a sentence-combining experiment. Fifty NSs of Cantonese studying Japanese in Hong Kong took the test, which controlled for the animacy of head noun phrases and arguments of the verbs. Results revealed no significant difference between SU and DO, which were both easier than OBL, with only a minimal effect of animacy. However, errors of converting DO and OBL target items into SU relatives almost exclusively involved animate-head items. The results suggest that the NPAH does not predict the difficulty order of Japanese RCs, and that learners use different types of RCs based on the animacy of the head noun.This paper is based on a paper presented at the Workshop on the L2 Acquisition of Relative Clauses (January 28, 2005, Cornell University). We thank the participants at the workshop (in particular, Stephen Matthews and John Whitman), Kevin Gregg, Zoe Luk, William O'Grady, Wataru Suzuki, and the two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their invaluable comments and discussions. Study 1 is part of the first author's doctoral dissertation, submitted to Ochanomizu University, and has appeared in Japanese (Ozeki, 2005b). Study 2 was conducted at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, supported by a Direct Grant for Research from the university. We thank Alexis Chu, Yumi Inoue, Zoe Luk, and Chi-Ming Ho for their assistance in data collection and/or the construction of the test material and the statistical consultants at Cornell University (in particular, Freedom King) for their assistance.

This study examines the effectiveness of written error corrections versus reformulations of second language learners' writing as two means of improving learners' grammatical accuracy on a three-stage composition-comparison-revision task. Concurrent verbal protocols were employed during the comparison stage in order to study the learners' reported awareness of the more targetlike reformulations. The reactivity of think-alouds as a research tool was also assessed. First, 15 adult learners of English participated in a repeated-measures study with three experimental conditions: error correction, reformulation, and reformulation + think-aloud. Participant reports of awareness in the reformulation + think-aloud condition suggested that noticing of feedback was related to the accuracy of subsequent revisions. A second nonrepeated-measures study was then carried out with 54 participants; a control group was added and the design was modified in an attempt to eliminate the reported tendency of learners to develop and use memorization strategies while processing the written feedback. In both experiments, participants performed significantly better in the error correction condition than in the reformulation condition. The think-alouds, used to examine learners' attentional processes, were found to be reactive in the first study; learners in the reformulation condition produced significantly more accurate revisions than those who were asked to think aloud while processing the reformulations they received. The results suggest that whereas verbal protocols might be able to shed some light on learner-internal processes in relation to written feedback, they should be employed and interpreted with care.We would like to thank Alison Mackey and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful suggestions on this article.

This article reports on a crosslinguistic comparative study of the processing of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) by Chinese-, Sinhalese-, Vietnamese-, Thai-, and Indonesian-speaking second language (L2) learners. A robust finding in studies on the acquisition of RCs in L2 English and other European languages is that subject-gap RCs are easier than object-gap RCs, both in production and comprehension. However, in the case of L2 Japanese studies, the picture does not seem to be as clear as in the English case. This study identifies some factors that might contribute to this situation. The results of a listening comprehension test involving reversible and nonreversible test sentences show that the five groups of learners overall found subject-gap RCs easier to process than object-gap RCs, but that their performances are poor and vary for sentence types in which no semantic cue is available to help identify the grammatical function of the overt noun phrase in RCs, yielding inconclusive results with respect to the question of whether subject-gap RCs are easier than object-gap RCs. Results indicate that when RCs are too difficult for learners to process, first language properties such as head direction, word order, and the relative order of filler and gap affect the manner in which they are interpreted.I am grateful to Stephen Matthews, William O'Grady, Yasuhiro Shirai, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Chisako Umeda for her help in collecting data.

In a paired-associate learning (PAL) task, Dutch university students (n = 129) learned 20 English second language (L2) idioms either receptively or productively (i.e., L2-first language [L1] or L1-L2) and were tested in two directions (i.e., recognition or production) immediately after learning and 3 weeks later. Receptive and productive performance was affected by direction of learning. This finding parallels findings from PAL experiments on L2 individual-word learning. On a productive test, productive learners had a sizable advantage over receptive learners, whereas on recognition, receptive learners outperformed productive learners. Two idiom characteristics, imageability (capacity to evoke a mental image) and transparency (overlap between literal and figurative meaning), as assessed in a norming study by an independent sample (n = 80), qualified these findings. Indicating the importance of dual coding in idiom learning, imageability predicted performance, and receptive learning was particularly inefficient for low imageable idioms. Transparency was a weaker predictor of performance and only affected recognition.This study is based on the first author's MA research. We would like to thank the four anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. Any errors or omissions remain our own.

This study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and second language (L2) fluency gains in native English-speaking adults learning Spanish in two learning contexts: at their home university or abroad in an immersion context. Phonological memory (operationalized as serial nonword recognition) and Spanish oral fluency (temporal/hesitation phenomena) were assessed at two times, 13 weeks apart. Hierarchical regressions showed that, after the variance attributable to learning context was partialed out, initial serial nonword recognition performance was significantly associated with L2 oral fluency development, explaining 4.5–9.7% of unique variance. These results indicate that phonological memory makes an important contribution to L2 learning in terms of oral fluency development. Furthermore, these results from an adult population extend conclusions from previous studies that have claimed a role for phonological memory primarily in vocabulary development in younger populations.This study was conducted by the first author as part of her doctoral dissertation research, under the supervision of Norman Segalowitz. The research was funded by a grant to Barbara Freed from the Council for International Educational Exchange (New York), in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Norman Segalowitz, in part from the Dean's Office, Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University to Norman Segalowitz, and in part from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec to Irena O'Brien. The authors wish to thank Manuel Díaz-Campos, Barbara Lafford, and Nicole Lazar, who were members of the research team involved in the larger project of which this study is one part. The authors would also like to thank Peter Scherzer, Leif French, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, the authors would like to thank Conchita Bueno, Hazel Casas, Elizabeth Gatbonton, Randall Halter, Guy Lacroix, Anne-Marie Linnen, Magnolia Negrete, Laura Renteria-Díaz, Marlene Taube-Schiff, and Naomi Yamasaki, who helped during various phases of this project.

This experimental study on the acquisition of the double-object construction in Spanish as a second language (L2) by a group of first language (L1) English adults investigates the role of Universal Grammar (UG) and its interaction with L1 in two modules of grammar: morphosyntax and semantics. The double-object construction in Spanish differs from its English counterpart in its morphosyntactic properties (case, clitic doubling, word order) and its semantics (interpretation of arguments and restrictions on the construction). Results show that L2 learners are sensitive to most of the morphosyntactic properties of the double-object construction but lag behind in the acquisition of its semantics. The experimental group shows evidence of UG-constrained acquisition in their sensitivity to morphosyntactic properties not instantiated in their L1 as well as in their nontarget but UG-licit analysis of the semantic restrictions of Spanish double objects. The dissociation between level of knowledge of morphosyntax and of semantics suggests that modularity of grammar is reflected in SLA exactly as it is in L1 acquisition.I am extremely grateful to Suzanne Flynn, Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, Andrew Stringfellow, Laura Colantoni, and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux for their generous assistance in terms of comments, encouragement, sharing of materials, and statistical analyses. I also want to thank the teachers and students that participated in the study as well as three anonymous SSLA reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

LANGUAGES IN CONTACT: THE PARTIAL RESTRUCTURING OF VERNACULARS. John Holm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 175. $65.00 cloth.

Second language acquisition scholars have long looked to pidgin and creole studies for insights into the nature of interlanguage. For example, Andersen (1983) discussed the psychological processes of pidginization and creolization. Pidginization is SLA under conditions of severely restricted input and results in a variety (an incipient pidgin language or the beginning stages of an interlanguage) with a small set of lexical items, analytic and highly variable syntax, and minimal stylistic alternatives. Creolization is first language acquisition where a pidgin language serves as the input. In these circumstances, children create new form-meaning relationships that are not present in the pidgin, relying on the innate language-making capacity that Bickerton (1984) called the bioprogram. Thus, a creole language is a fully complex language that involves a radical restructuring of the lexifier language. Andersen (1983) coined the term nativization to include both processes, which, he noted, represent movement toward an internal norm. When pidgin and creole speakers come into greater contact with speakers of the superstrate, input is increased and the contact varieties are restructured in the direction of the standard language, a process Andersen called denativization.

This quasi-experimental study explores the effects of three types of instruction (form-based, meaning-based, and form- plus meaning-based) on the learning of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) and postsecondary Japanese as a foreign language learners' ability to generalize different types of relativization, examined in comparison to the predictions of Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH). The study investigated whether instruction focused on a marked relativization type could facilitate the learning of other types. Results of comprehension and sentence-combination pretests and posttests showed that although the scores of all three groups increased, the form-based group outperformed the other two groups on both tests. Whereas the comprehension pretest results did not reflect the predictions of the NPAH, participants were able to generalize rules for other relativization types. This study suggests that learners' attention to detailed analysis of form facilitates the learning of RCs in this context, and that the teaching of marked items might inform effective syllabus development in second language relativization.I would like to thank Yasuhiro Shirai for giving me an opportunity to present this paper at the workshop on the SLA of relative clauses held at Cornell University on January 28, 2006. I greatly appreciate the insightful feedback that I received from the participants of the workshop (in particular, Stephen Matthews, James Mitchell, and Hiromi Ozeki) as well as the two anonymous SSLA reviewers, and Kiyoko Toratani, my colleague at York University. This paper is part of my doctoral dissertation to be submitted to the University of Toronto, and I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Sharon Lapkin, as well as my thesis committee members, Nina Spada, Eunice Jang, and Yuki Johnson, for their continuous support and encouragement. I am also grateful to my former students in the Japanese course for agreeing to participate in this study.

This article comprises two parts. The first part is a critique of R. Ellis's (2005) psychometric study, which attempted to use an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to establish operationalizations of the constructs of explicit and implicit knowledge. I argue that the choice of an EFA in this endeavor is misguided and that a confirmatory factor analysis should have been employed. Additionally, the specific execution of the EFA is criticized on a number of fronts. The major claim of the critique is that R. Ellis's study does not successfully demonstrate that his operationalizations are reducible to the two factors of implicit and explicit knowledge. The second part of this article goes on to make some methodological recommendations for future research in this area. Finally, the potential of structural equation modeling is pointed out as a response to Hulstijn's (2005) warning concerning the pitfalls of extreme rationalism and extreme empiricism within the future research trajectory of explicit and implicit knowledge.

DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOM.Paul Gruba. Sydney, NSW: Macquarie University, 2005. Pp. vi + 64. $49.95 paper.

This volume, part of the “Teaching with New Technology” series, aims to provide teachers with practical techniques and lesson plans that employ computer-based technologies in second language (L2) classrooms. The volume helps promote teaching and the development of media literacy utilizing digitized video clips, and it provides access to both practical and research-based approaches. The author presents pertinent research summaries and issues in order to help teachers understand the theoretical bases behind various teaching techniques and eventually allow them to conduct action research in their own classrooms.

TESTING THE SPOKEN ENGLISH OF YOUNG NORWEGIANS: A STUDY OF TEST VALIDITY AND THE ROLE OF ‘SMALLWORDS’ IN CONTRIBUTING TO PUPILS' FLUENCY.Angela Hasselgreen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. v + 304. $36.00 paper.

This volume is an impressive demonstration of what is suggested by language testers' and teachers' discussions of test validity but is seldom undertaken. Hasselgreen's book represents a monumental and painstaking study that began with the pilot of the speaking portion of the evaluation of English as a school subject (EVA) in the spring of 1995 and, we can assume, has continued even after the publication of this book in 2004.

Ellis (2005) and his coresearchers developed a number of tests with a view to providing relatively separate measures of explicit and implicit knowledge. The aim in the development of these tests was to resolve a continuing problem in SLA studies—namely the construct validity of tests used to measure acquisition—and, more specifically, to provide a basis for investigating the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge (i.e., the strong interface, the weak interface, and the noninterface positions).

This study examines how Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) intersects with the typological characteristics of Korean in the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs). Korean has two types of RC constructions: head-external and head-internal. The head-external relative has its head to the right of the RC, whereas the head-internal relative has its lexical head in the RC and is marked by the complementizer kes. In first language development, it has been observed the head-internal type emerges earlier than the head-external type. The current study investigates how the use of the two types of RCs interacts with the NPAH, with a focus on subject (SU) and direct object (DO) RCs in Korean second language development. Oral production data were collected from 40 learners of Korean as a foreign language. The results showed that there was an advantage for SU over DO in the head-external RC and that the head-external construction was preceded by headless and head-internal constructions. The results suggest that a head-external RC in Korean involves the syntactic mechanism of linking the head and the gap relation, whereas this might not be the case for a head-internal RC.The authors would like to thank Yasuhiro Shirai, Stephen Matthews, Virginia Yip, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable input and feedback on this paper. Any errors, of course, are our own.