This longitudinal case study from a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) perspective touches upon an under-researched issue: L1 development over the lifespan. Levinson (1978) predicts three stages in adulthood: early, mid and late, with a decline in late adulthood. We examine Diane Larsen-Freeman's publications over a period of 50 years (from age…

In commercial materials for the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation, common bottom-up approaches segment phonology into a series of discrete and decontextualized linguistic components with rules that students are encouraged to internalize. Such approaches seem out of step with recent second language acquisition (SLA) theory and research…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

This article introduces this special issue by declaring that the studies contained here build on the idea that multilinguals, in the sense of learners or speakers that have more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire, are different from bilinguals and monolinguals in various ways. Several authors in the area of third language…

Skill acquisition theorists conceptualize second language (L2) learning as the acquisition of a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. The dominant view in skill acquisition theory is to regard L2 skill acquisition as a three-stage process "from initial representation of knowledge through initial changes in behavior to eventual…

This study is aimed to re-examine the Interface Hypothesis via investigating the adult L2 acquisition of the word order variation of numeral classifier indefinites at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces in L2 Chinese. A computerized acceptability judgment task was administered to 41 advanced and intermediate adult Korean learners…

Fundamental to complex dynamic systems theory is the assumption that the recursive behavior of complex systems results in the generation of physical forms and dynamic processes that are self-similar and scale-invariant. Such fractal-like structures and the organismic benefit that they engender has been widely noted in physiology, biology, and…

Sociocultural theories consider language learning as a social practice examines students as active participants in the construction of learning processes. This study investigates sociocultural theories' central concepts, which includes peer interaction and feedback, private speech, and self-efficacy. The present study is a case study of twenty…

The main goal consisted in identifying and bringing together strategies of multilinguals as a particular learner group. Therefore, research was placed in the intersection of the three fields: language learning strategies (LLS), third language acquisition (TLA), and the didactics of plurilingualism. First, the paper synthesises the major findings…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found…

A number of asymmetries in lexical memory emerge when monolinguals and early bilinguals are compared to (relatively) late second language (L2) learners. Their study promises to provide insight into the internal processes that both support and ultimately limit L2 learner achievement. Generally, theory building in L2 and bilingual lexical memory has…

This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

This study contributes to a central debate within contemporary generative second language (L2) theorizing: the extent to which adult learners are (un)able to acquire new functional features that result in a L2 grammar that is mentally structured like the native target (see White, 2003). The adult acquisition of L2 nominal phi-features is explored,…