Emergentist, usage-based L2 research has witnessed that emphasizing formulaic sequences as entry points in meaning-based instructional contexts contributes to the development of linguistic comprehension and production. Related studies have thus far striven to find the most effective methods of highlighting these word strings. This study explored…

An increasing number of adults learn more than one foreign language simultaneously. While the cognitive benefits of using multiple languages from birth have been studied extensively, little is known about possible cognitive benefits of learning multiple languages simultaneously in adulthood. Among the cognitive abilities which play a role in…

The present study explores the effects of structured input and traditional instruction on the acquisition of English causative passive forms using online measurements (eye-tracking). Previous empirical research investigating the effects of processing instruction through offline measurements (sentence and discourse) has overall shown positive…

In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on…

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production…

Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in children. However, little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults.…

The current study examined the nature of deaf readers' phonological processing during online word recognition, and how this compares to similar effects in hearing individuals. Unlike many previous studies on phonological activation, we examined whether deaf readers activated phonological representations for words as opposed to pseudohomophones.…

This comparative, classroom-based study investigated the effect and effectiveness of introducing a focus on form approach to a content-based, occupation-specific language program for adults. Thirty-six adults in two classes participated in a 10-week study. One group of 16 adults received content-based instruction that included a focus on form…

Emotional prosody provides important cues for understanding the emotions of others in every day communication. Asperger's syndrome (AS) is a developmental disorder characterised by pronounced deficits in socio-emotional communication, including difficulties in the domain of prosody processing. We measured pupillary responses as an index of…

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) deserve praise for their superlative synthesis of literature relating to grammatical processing, as well as for their original contributions to this area of research. CF "explore the idea that there might be fundamental differences between child L1 and adult L2 processing." The researchers present evidence that adult second…

Correct information unit (CIU) and main event analyses are quantitative measures for analyzing discourse of individuals with aphasia. Comparative data from healthy younger (YG) and older (OD) adults and an investigation of the influence of stimuli type would considerably extend the usefulness of such analyses. The objectives were (a) to compare…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…