Daily conversations contain many repetitions of identical and similar word forms. For bilinguals, the words can even come from the same or different languages. How do such repetitions affect the human word recognition system? The Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model provides a theoretical and computational framework for understanding…

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a relatively new field of enquiry. Before the late 1960s, educators did write about L2 learning, but very much as an adjunct of language teaching pedagogy, underpinned by behaviourism, the then-dominant learning theory in psychology. In this view, the task facing learners of foreign languages was to rote-learn…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…

The Language and Literature Division (LLD) is the largest of the six divisions of the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong (HKU). It is currently home to 34 academic staff, who specialize either in the fields of Chinese Language, English Language and/or Literature Education, and to 60 full-time and 28 part-time doctoral students, who are…

This article focuses on the use of conversation analysis (CA) to help teaching interactional competence in English to adult second language learners from lower to intermediate levels. To set the context, this article gives a brief overview on the use of CA in second language research as well as considering the construct of interactional competence…

Since "multicompetence" was proposed by Cook, there have been debates about the nature of distinction between monocompetence and multicompetence, the distinctiveness of languages in the mind and the homogeneity of language knowledge across speakers and contexts. The paper will address these issues from a linguistic perspective and make an attempt…

The aim of this article is to give an up-to-date picture of study of the role of the background languages (the first language, L1, and the second language, L2) in third language (L3) acquisition, mainly in the two areas of vocabulary and syntax. These seem to be the two linguistic levels on which there has so far been most research concerning…

Stuttering occurs across all languages and cultures. However, the impact of speaking more than one language on assessment and treatment of young children who stutter is not well documented. This paper discusses some of the challenges related to clinical issues pertaining to this population including (a) identifying stuttering in an unfamiliar…

This paper describes a case study of language development in rural Papua New Guinea, in which parents felt the local school was not meeting the educational needs of their children. In this case study, the local, national and global narratives concerning use of the vernacular in education were apparent in the negotiation leading to an apparent…

Interest in L2 vocabulary learning and teaching started long before the nineteen-eighties (for references to earlier studies, see Rob Waring's database http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/vocab/vocrefs/vocref.html) but it declined with the advent of generative linguistics to the point of discrimination and neglect (Meara 1980). In 1986, I argued…

Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge, the conceptual understanding of…

Neuroimaging techniques are becoming not only more and more sophisticated but are also coming to be increasingly accessible to researchers. One thing that one should take note of is the potential of neuroimaging research within second language acquisition (SLA) to contribute to issues pertaining to the plasticity of the adult brain and to general…

The novelty of Lardiere's proposal does not reside in her so-called "rehabilitation" of Contrastive Analysis. In generative second language acquisition research, appeal to the best available analyses and descriptions of the languages under investigation has always been a top priority, whether the focus was parameters, functional categories or…

Newly updated and revised, this popular text provides a solid introduction to the foundations of research methods, with the goal of enabling students and professionals in the field of applied linguistics to become not just casual consumers of research who passively read bits and pieces of a research article, but "discerning" consumers able to…

In this personal narrative, I offer reflections about the process of conducting a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic research project with teachers of English in China. Lessons learned from this study address some of the hegemonic perspectives and assumptions that can be dysconsciously held by native English-speakers, the value of crossing borders…