When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

Following calls for more modality-sensitive perspectives of SLA, this study investigated the extent to which (a) producing the second language (L2) in the oral modality impacts learner-generated noticing and L2 development of grammatical structures embedded in subsequent auditory input, and whether (b) engaging in L2 production and input…

This study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a "yes-bias" towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs.…

Response onset latencies for sentences that start with a conjoined noun phrase are typically longer than for sentences starting with a simple noun phrase. This suggests that advance planning has phrasal scope, which may or may not be lexically driven. All previous studies have involved spoken production, leaving open the possibility that effects…

Purpose: In spite of improvements in language outcomes for children with hearing loss (HL) arising from cochlear implants (CIs), these children can falter when it comes to academic achievement, especially in higher grades. Given that writing becomes increasingly relevant to educational pursuits as children progress through school, this study…

We conducted a multisite replication of Yang and Lyster's (2010) study investigating the effects of recasts and prompts on learning English regular and irregular past tense. Our study was conducted with intact high school and vocational school classes in Italy and Bosnia. Our participants were young adolescents (14-15 and 16-17 years old), a…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there were differences in levels of sentence complexity and grammatical correctness between the spoken and written persuasive language of adolescents with Learning Disabilities (LDs). After viewing short videos providing background information on controversial animal welfare topics, spoken and…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…

This paper investigated how production task combined with teacher feedback (in the form of recasts) affects child second language development, and the effects of task complexity on their production performance. 92 child learners of English in three intact classes were assigned to three tasks of different complexity (simple, +complex, ++complex).…

The present study examined the effects of different types of written input on the learning and retention of collocational knowledge. Eighty-three second language (L2) learners from four intact classes were divided into a control group and three treatment groups. The treatment groups were provided with infrequent grammatical collocations embedded…

The role of recasts, a corrective feedback technique, has received much attention from instructed SLA researchers. While a variety of factors have been identified as influencing their effectiveness in facilitating uptake and L2 development (e.g., learners' age and level of proficiency), the role of mode of interaction has been the object of…

This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second language (L2) English interaction in which speakers appear to be visualizing text as they talk. One way they do this is by slotting out elements of a turn-in-progress in the air, shifting their hand in a slotting gesture from left to right as they say…