When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more…

Models of language acquisition are constrained by the information that learners can extract from their input. Experiment 1 investigated whether 3-month-old infants are able to encode a repeated, unsegmented sequence of five syllables. Event-related-potentials showed that infants reacted to a change of the initial or the final syllable, but not to…

The range of modern dynamic social changes, globalization of world powers' economic cooperation, acceleration of technocratic processes have widespread impact on term systems' variability in language, in particular, on terminological variability for specific purposes. This globalized extra-linguistic factor provokes avalanche growth of…

This pragmatic study of the speech act of apology aims to look into the apology strategies and felicity conditions fulfilled in the public apology statements of an American and a Filipino TV host after alleged faults done during the pageant nights of Miss Universe 2015 and Binibining Pilipinas 2015, respectively. Specifically, the study purposes…

This paper reviews major findings from qualitative and quantitative research on language learning in student mobility in order to consider how telecollaboration might contribute to the success of student sojourns abroad. Evidence is available to demonstrate the effectiveness of student mobility in every domain of language development. As may be…

This article highlights a series of areas deemed worthy of attention by L2 researchers. In some cases the research effort would entail following up on studies initiated some years ago and in other cases the effort would involve relatively new research thrusts. The article includes ideas about research regarding: (1) "pathways to success in…

What is the relationship, in US writing studies, between scholarship about writing and scholarship about language? What should it be? "Language" and "linguistics" in general have been othered; "internationalization" or "mondialisation" might serve as catalyst for exchange and collaboration and making…

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers' sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in…

This study considers the role of L1 phonological influence in L2 English past tense morphology production by native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. While these L1s share similar phonological restrictions on consonant cluster formation needed for English past tense morphology, differences arise in L1 syntax (only Mandarin lacks…

The interaction between input frequency and constructional interference receives little attention in second language (L2) research. Two studies were conducted to test the effect of this interaction. Study 1 examined effects of both Zipfian frequency (ZF) and balanced frequency (BF) on L2 learning of English subject-extracted relative clauses…

Over the past several decades, applied linguistics and second language (L2) acquisition and teaching have been areas of prolific research and have undergone continual development. The purpose of this article is to identify essential themes in the field of applied linguistics, focusing more intensely on teaching and learning second languages in a…

This study investigates the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native, heritage, and second/foreign language speakers with respect to licensing of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by unaccusative and unergative subjects (the "FNQ diagnostic"). Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether and how…

This article proposes that second language learners can use indirect positive evidence (IPE) to acquire a phonological grammar that is a subset of their L1 grammar. IPE is evidence from errors in the learner's L1 made by native speakers of the learner's L2. It has been assumed that subset grammars may be acquired using direct or indirect negative…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals on executive function tasks, including tasks that tap cognitive flexibility, conflict monitoring, and task-switching abilities. Some have suggested that bilinguals also have greater working memory capacity than comparable monolinguals, but evidence for this suggestion is mixed. We therefore conducted a…