Given that this special issue is devoted to the acquisition and processing of inflectional morphology by second language (L2) learners, the question in the title may appear redundant. However, recent research on first language (L1) and L2 morphological processing has challenged basic assumptions about the status of inflectional morphology in…

The majority of studies in second-language (L2) speech processing have involved unimodal (i.e., auditory) input; however, in many instances, speech communication involves both visual and auditory sources of information. Some researchers have argued that multimodal speech is the primary mode of speech perception (e.g., Rosenblum 2005). Research on…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

This volume brings together theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingualism and discusses their implications for L2 pedagogy. The book is organized into three sections that focus on prominent linguistic and cognitive theories and together provide a compelling set of state-of-the-art works. Part I…

There are several major questions in the literature on late second language (L2) learning and processing. Some of these questions include: Can late L2 learners process an L2 in a native-like way? What is the nature of the differences in L2 processing among L2 learners at different levels of L2 proficiency? In this article, we review studies that…

The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the…

A proportion of children with visual impairments have specific reading difficulties that cannot be easily explained. This article reviews the data on problems with braille reading and interprets them from the framework of the temporal-processing deficit theory of developmental dyslexia.

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

It has been proposed that external interfaces are vulnerable to residue optionality, whereas pure syntax and internal interfaces are acquirable in second language (L2) acquisition (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006). The proposal was tested in this article through the interpretation of overt and null embedded arguments in L2 Chinese…

Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the…

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to…

The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe…

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…