Intercultural Communicative Competence is a paramount goal of modern foreign language teaching. It is the ability to communicate in culturally sensitive and contextually appropriate ways with speakers from other cultures. Being able to apologize is one component of this competence. Uttering apologies allows learners to rectify breaches of social…

Situated within second language (L2) research about the acquisition of morphosyntax, this study investigated English L2 speakers' detection and primed production of a novel construction with morphological and structural features. We report on two experiments with Thai (n = 69) and Farsi (n = 70) English L2 speakers, respectively, carried out an…

In this response to Demestre's comment, we first discuss the terms "legal" and "prohibited," applied to syntactic structures, stressing that there are boundaries in which the legality of certain constructions appears imprecise and is a matter of discussion. This coalesces with actual and daily use by native speakers of a language, who can normally…

Written corrective feedback, referred to hereafter as "written CF" and also known as "grammar correction" or "error correction", has been a controversial topic in second language studies over the past fifteen years. Inspired by John Truscott's thought-provoking 1996 essay in "Language Learning", many different researchers have undertaken new…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

In this paper a case of synchronic layering is examined in which Dutch "massa" ("mass") and plural "massa's" ("masses") are attested with lexical uses as a collective noun, quantifying uses ("a large quantity of") and intensifying uses ("very")--with plural "massa's" only--in some Flemish varieties of Dutch. Against the background of…

In this article, I explore how connectionism might expand its role in second language acquisition (SLA) theory by showing how some symbolic models of bilingual and second language lexical memory can be reduced to a biologically realistic (i.e., neurally plausible) connectionist model. This integration or hybridization of the two models follows the…

This study provides a systematic phonetic analysis of the basic entities of Kabardian prosodic units above the word and investigates the predictability of prosodic units from grammatical and discourse factors. This dissertation is the first extensive description of Kabardian prosody and grammar based on natural data. This study proposes that…

This dissertation examines the syntactic positions of nominal arguments in Turkish, looking at Turkish clausal structure based on Aktionsart (aspectual) properties (e.g. Vendler 1967) of (dynamic) predicates from the perspective of Antisymmetry (Kayne 1994). It has been argued that indefinite/non-specific arguments appear syntactically in lower…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between Universal Grammar and the properties that Universal Grammar constrains, by investigating how language is created/acquired. The framework proposed in this dissertation provides us with tools for predicting what will and will not appear in linguistic systems of…

This study reports a meta-analysis that synthesizes the empirical research on the role of language aptitude in second language grammar acquisition. A total of 33 study reports were identified including 17 predictive studies that investigated the correlations between aptitude and ultimate L2 attainment and 16 interactional studies that examined the…

Theories of how people construct linguistic form during production are largely based on English and closely related languages. We report three experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate grammatical encoding in Mandarin Chinese, in particular the way conceptual information is mapped onto grammatical structure. The results…

In the English lexicon, laryngeal alternations in the plural (e.g. "leaf" ~ "leaves") impact monosyllables more than finally stressed polysyllables. This is the opposite of what happens typologically, and would thereby run contrary to the predictions of "initial-syllable faithfulness." Despite the lexical pattern, in a wug test we found…

In natural languages, the mapping from surface form to meaning is often quite complex, and hence the acquisition of the phenomena at the boundary between syntax and semantics has been one of the central issues in current acquisition research. This study addresses the issue of whether children have adult-like knowledge of LF "wh"-movement and its…

This paper, after shortly introducing "Folk Linguistics" by defining its domain of competence [cf. Preston, Dennis R., ed. 1999. "Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology." Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Niedzielski, Nancy A., and Dennis R. Preston. 2003. "Folk Linguistics." Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter], attempts to draw an…