Previous studies attest that early bilinguals can modify their perceptual identification according to the fine-grained phonetic detail of the language they believe they are hearing. Following Gonzales et al. (2019), we replicate the double phonemic boundary effect in late learners (LBs) using conceptual-based cueing. We administered a forced choice identification task to 169 native English adult learners of Spanish in two sessions. In both sessions, participants identified the same /b/-/p/ voicing continuum, but language context was cued conceptually using the instructions. The data were analyzed using Bayesian multilevel regression. Learners categorized the continuum in a similar manner when they believed they were hearing English. However, when they believed they were hearing Spanish, “voiceless” responses increased as a function of L2 proficiency. This research demonstrates the double phonemic boundary effect can be conceptually cued in LBs and supports accounts positing selective activation of independent perception grammars in L2 learning.

This study is a replication and extension of Morgan-Short et al.’s (2018) investigation into the role of attention in input processing by L1-Polish learners of L2-Spanish, with proficiency and language of assessment explored as two key methodological factors. Our aims were twofold: to investigate learners’ comprehension in different conditions with their L2 proficiency controlled for, and to examine this process when learners were tested using different languages. Data from three trials (N = 136) were analyzed: Trial-English, Trial-Polish, and Trial-Spanish, where comprehension was tested in English, Polish, or Spanish, respectively. Results showed that both L2 proficiency and language of assessment significantly affected learners’ performance, with their scores being lower in the -n morpheme condition but only when comprehension was tested in English or Spanish. We discuss these findings both theoretically and methodologically, making recommendations on designing future replication studies and improving the generalizability of L2 findings across multiple research sites.

This study conceptually replicates Cepeda, Coburn, Rohrer, Wixted, Mozer, & Pashler’s (2009, Experiment 1) study on the effects of distributed practice on second language (L2) vocabulary learning to examine its generalizability to a new context and population sample. The secondary focus of the paper is to examine the challenges and affordances of online data collection and participant recruitment sites. Both the original and our study examined the effects of distributed practice on two study sessions to learn L2 vocabulary assessed on a 10-day delayed posttest. Our results showed that the spaced conditions significantly outperformed the massed condition, mirroring the original study’s findings. However, Cepeda et al.’s (2009) participants outscored our participants by 10–20% (in each experimental group) on the posttest. While these findings highlight the benefits of spacing towards learning and memory, they also underscore the challenges researchers may face when conducting experimental research in online environments.

This study partially replicates McManus and Marsden (2017), who found that providing L1 explicit information (EI) plus task-essential practice led L2 learners to make more accurate and faster interpretations of French morphosyntax. The current study removed the original study’s L1 EI component to examine the role of the L1 practice. This design tested whether providing L1 task-essential practice only (alongside a core treatment of L2 EI plus L2 practice) resulted in similar online and offline learning gains compared to the original study’s L1 EI plus L1 practice. We used the same online and offline tests, with a similar population of English-speaking learners of L2 French (n = 19). For accuracy and speed of online and offline L2 processing, the findings suggest that additional L1 practice without L1 EI was no more beneficial than L2 EI plus L2 practice alone, indicating that the original study’s combination of additional L1 EI with L1 practice appeared to contribute to previously observed learning benefits.

This study expands on previous research into filler-gap dependency processing in second language (L2) English, by means of a replication of Canales’s (2012) self-paced reading study. Canales, among others, found that advanced L2-English speakers exhibited the same processing behavior that Stowe (1986) found for native English processing: On encountering a filler, they posited gaps in licensed positions and avoided positing gaps in grammatically unlicensed island positions. However, the previous L2 studies focused on advanced-level L2 proficiency and did not test specifically for first language (L1) influence. The present study compares two groups of intermediate-level L2-English speakers with contrasting non-wh-movement L1s, Jordanian Arabic and Mandarin, to investigate the effects of L1 influence and individual differences in proficiency. Our results provide evidence that at intermediate level, too, L2 filler-gap processing adheres to grammatical constraints. L1 did not affect this behavior, but proficiency effects emerged, with larger licensed filled-gap effects at higher proficiency.

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)—an understudied group in the literature—and investigates whether these learners, in contrast to those in the original study, reactivate the moved element at its original position in the sentence. Bayesian multilevel regression is used to analyze the data. The results suggest that higher-working-memory participants did reactivate the moved element at its structural origin. By extending previous research to an understudied group, the study contributes to our knowledge regarding sensitivity to abstract syntactic structure in L2 processing.

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article the: [+definite, +/-anaphoric]. In the current study, the participants were 28 advanced and 25 intermediate L1-Chinese L2-English learners and the native control data were from Cho. The results from an acceptability judgment task revealed that intermediate Chinese speakers, unlike advanced speakers, had difficulties in the nonanaphoric definite condition where, without a potential antecedent, definiteness is established through pragmatic knowledge and acquisition of nonanaphoric definiteness essentially takes place at the semantics-pragmatics interface. The findings of this article suggest that accommodating presuppositions at the semantics-pragmatics interface is challenging to L2 learners, even when feature reassembly is not required.

This study presents a conceptual replication of Birulés et al.’s (2020, Experiment 2) investigation of native and nonnative listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth with the goal of better understanding the potentially modulating role of proficiency in listeners’ reliance on audiovisual speech cues. Listeners’ eye gaze was recorded while watching two short videos. Findings from one of the videos replicated results from the original study, showing greater attention to the talker’s mouth among L2 than L1 listeners. In both videos, L2 proficiency modulated attention, with more fixations on the mouth among lower proficiency listeners, an effect predicted but not observed in the original study. Collectively, these laboratory-based findings highlight the role of visual speech cues in L2 listening and present evidence that listeners with more limited proficiency may be especially reliant on such cues. These observations warrant future investigations of the benefits of visual speech cues in instructional and assessment contexts.

This study is a conceptual replication of Rogers and Cheung’s (2018) investigation into distribution of practice effects on the learning of L2 vocabulary in child EFL classrooms in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, 66 primary school students (Cantonese L1) studied 20 vocabulary items over three training episodes under spaced-short (1-day interval) or spaced-long (8-day interval) learning conditions. The spacing of the vocabulary items was manipulated within-participants, and learning was assessed using crossword puzzles following a 4-week delay. While Rogers and Cheung (2018) resulted in minimal overall learning with a slight advantage for the spaced-short group, this study found large learning gains across the experimental conditions with no significant differences between the two learning schedules. Taken together, these results provide evidence that the results from previous research examining input spacing with adult populations in laboratory contexts might not generalize to authentic child learning contexts.

Is it possible to acquire a sensitivity to a regularity in language without intending to and without awareness of what it is? In this conceptual replication and extension of an earlier study (Williams, 2005) participants were trained on a semiartificial language in which determiner choice was dependent on noun animacy. Participants who did not report awareness or recognition of this rule were nevertheless above chance at selecting the correct determiner in novel contexts. However, further analyses based on trial-by-trial subjective judgments and item similarity statistics were consistent with the possibility that responses were based on conscious feelings of familiarity or analogy to trained items rather than unconscious knowledge of a semantic generalization. The results are discussed in terms of instance-based approaches to memory and language, and the implications for the concept of “learning without awareness” are considered.

An important issue in second-language acquisition concerns the role of explicit information (EI) and how it is affected by individual differences. The present study explored this question through a partial replication and extension of Fernández (2008: Experiment 2), which investigated the effects of EI in processing instruction (PI) for the Spanish present subjunctive. This replication compared training with EI (PI) to training without it (structured input; SI). In addition to methodological changes that balance the amount of exposure between groups, this study also includes a control group that received exposure to the target form (C+). Extending the original study, we also assessed the durability of training and whether its effects interact with individual differences in working memory (WM). Results indicate advantages for the PI group during training, supporting Fernández’s conclusions. Immediate post-tests show advantages for the PI group that are not sustained on delayed post-tests. Analyses also indicate benefits for higher WM but only for the PI and C+ groups, although this was only sustained for the C+ group. Thus, findings indicate that when paired with SI, EI and high WM may influence the initial learning of the Spanish subjunctive, but their influence may dissipate over time.

Boduch-Grabka and Lev-Ari (2021) showed that so-called “native” British-English speakers judged statements produced by Polish-accented English speakers as less likely to be true than statements produced by “native” speakers and that prior exposure to Polish-accented English speech modulates this effect. Given the real-world consequences of this study, as well as our commitment to assessing and mitigating linguistic biases, we conducted a close replication, extending the work by collecting additional information about participants’ explicit biases towards Polish migrants in the UK. We did not reproduce the original pattern of results, observing no effect of speaker accent or exposure on comprehension or veracity. In addition, the measure of explicit bias did not predict differential veracity ratings for Polish- and British-accented speech. Although the current pattern of results differs from that of the original study, our finding that neither comprehension nor veracity were impacted by accent or exposure condition is not inconsistent with the Boduch-Grabka and Lev-Ari (2021) processing difficulty account of the accent-based veracity judgment effect. We explore possible explanations for the lack of replication and future directions for this work.

This study is a close replication of Kanwit and Geeslin (2014), a variationist investigation of the interpretation of verbal moods in adverbial clauses in Spanish. Whereas the first language (L1) of the second-language participants in the initial study was English, we explore whether Kanwit and Geeslin’s results extend to other L1 populations—Swedish and French learners of Spanish. Participants in the replication study completed the same interpretation task and grammar test as those in the initial study. Results showed, for example, that multiple factors influenced their variable interpretation of verbal moods, there was evidence of change between course levels, and there were certain differences in interpretation between the French and Swedish groups. This study contributes to knowledge about the interpretation of a variable structure by enhancing the confirmatory power of some of the initial study’s findings, while also suggesting that the learners’ L1 leads to diverging findings.

This paper reports a complete secondary analysis of Jeon and Yamashita’s (2022) systematic review to build the second language (L2) model of the simple view of reading (SVR). The same meta-analytic methodologies were maintained, with the exception of applying meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). This study successfully replicated some of the aggregated correlations but not others, owing to (a) the recoding of the original raw data to recreate a dataset and (b) the motivated change in sample selection from a longitudinal study for MASEM. The MASEM results extended previous findings that L2 comprehension skills contribute more to L2 reading comprehension than L2 decoding skills, and together explain a large amount of variance in L2 reading comprehension. The SVR model with metalinguistic skills showed their contribution to L2 decoding and comprehension skills, but no direct impact on L2 reading comprehension, supporting the parsimonious structure of SVR in L2.

This study closely replicates the analyses of the third research question in Römer and Berger (2019), which reported that the associations between verbs and verb argument constructions (VACs) used by German and Spanish learners of English move closer to a native usage norm as the learners’ proficiency increases. This study conducted the same correlation analyses from the original study but with a substantially expanded version of the learner corpus used therein. Additionally, we conducted zero-inflated negative binomial analyses to estimate the relationship between the frequencies of verb-VAC combinations in the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the learner subcorpora representing different proficiency levels. Our findings were consistent with the original study in showing significant positive correlations between frequencies of the verb-VAC combinations in the BNC and in the learner subcorpora but further revealed the potential effect of topic on the learners’ VAC usage. Implications for future studies are discussed.

Darcy et al. (2016) examined the relationship between language abilities and general cognition, or specifically, how inhibitory control might relate to L2 speech perception and production. Given that their findings unexpectedly indicated a stronger relationship between inhibitory control and perception in comparison to inhibitory control and production, and because inhibitory control was measured using a single, retrieval-induced inhibition task, the current study is a close replication with the inclusion of two additional tasks of intentional inhibition: the Stroop task and the Simon task. A comparison of the descriptive statistics for the tests of phonological processing and retrieval-induced inhibition between the initial study and current replication indicated negligible differences between the two participant samples. However, results of the partial correlation analyses in the current replication did not indicate clear relationships between phonological variables and inhibitory control. Possible explanations for the different patterning of results and implications for future replications are discussed.

Despite accumulating evidence, accounts for the efficacy of reading-while-listening (RWL) in facilitating vocabulary learning are largely unexamined, hindering a thorough understanding of the reasons underlying the usefulness of such bimodal input. In this article, we report a close replication of Malone (2018), purposefully manipulating the participants’ native language background to shed light on whether the auditory component in RWL promotes spoken-written form mappings. One hundred and eighty-eight English learners from Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, and Beijing read or read and listened to four stories containing target words for learning. They completed two surprise vocabulary tests and two assessments of working memory capacity. We only replicated a correlation between working memory capacity and the form recognition test reported in the initial study. Thanks to our manipulation, we discovered an important role of L1 background in the effectiveness of RWL for form recognition knowledge. We discuss the implications for RWL research.

This study was an approximate replication of Rothman (2011),examining the determiner phrase syntax of a large sample (n = 211) of L3 learners of Portuguese who spoke English and Spanish. Rothman (2011) investigated whether L3 Italian or Brazilian Portuguese speakers are differently impacted by another known Romance Language, if it was their L1 or L2. The original study concluded that groups did not perform differently on experimental tasks on the basis of a null effect, and that the typological similarity of Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian predicts transfer in the initial stages of L3 acquisition. The present replication recreated all materials, which were unavailable, and examined the same population and questions. However, rather than examining L3 Italian and L3 Brazilian Portuguese, the present work maintained a constant L3 Portuguese. Learners were divided into two groups in a mirror-image design (n = 96 L1 English-L2 Spanish, n = 115 L1 Spanish-L2 English), and data were collected online. Like the original study, there was no main effect of group in any of the two-way analyses of variance. However, results show that it should not be assumed that experimental groups behave equivalently based on a null effect: Of the four total post hoc tests of equivalence, only two were significant when the equivalence bounds were set at a small effect size (d = $ \pm $ .4). Ultimately, it is argued that determining the smallest effect size of interest and subsequent equivalence testing are necessary to answer key questions in the field of L3 acquisition.

Over the past decades, bilingualism researchers have come to a consensus around a fairly strong view of nonselectivity in bilingual speakers, often citing Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) as a critical piece of support for this position. Given the study’s continuing relevance to bilingualism and its strong test of the influence of a bilingual’s second language on their first language, we conducted an approximate replication of the lexical decision experiments in the original study (Experiments 2 and 3) using the same tasks and—to the extent possible—the same stimuli. Unlike the original study, our replication was conducted online with Dutch–English bilinguals (rather than in a lab with Dutch–English–French trilinguals). Despite these differences, results overall closely replicated the pattern of cognate facilitation effects observed in the original study. We discuss the replication of outcomes and possible interpretations of subtle differences in outcomes and make recommendations for future extensions of this line of research.

This paper reports a replication of part of Tavakoli and Foster’s (2008) investigation into the influence of narrative task design on second language (L2) oral performance. The initial study found in part that narratives with both foreground and background information elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than those with only foreground information. This close replication adds the variable of literacy, conducting the study with adult refugees to New Zealand with low first language (L1) literacy. Participants narrated two of the four cartoon strips in Tavakoli and Foster (2008). In contrast to the initial study, background information in the narrative tasks had no impact on the syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, or fluency of performances. However, given the tendency of participants to omit background events, this outcome is discussed in terms of visual literacy, and aptness to describe rather than connect the cartoon frames. The implications for the use of narrative tasks with such learners are explored.