This paper examines the interference of L1 neutralization rules in the acquisition of a markedL2 phonological feature. More specifically, it presents results from a study of the acquisition ofthe voicing contrast in English word-final obstruents by native speakers of Catalan. The voicingcontrast in final position in Catalan is neutralized by voicing or devoicing rules, depending onthe environment. The results of an experiment testing the production of target final obstruents indifferent environments indicate a very high incidence of devoicing, which confirms theprevalence of final devoicing in second language acquisition and points to the joint effect oftransfer and universal tendencies. In contrast with devoicing, the results reveal a more limitedeffect of the L1 voicing rules. It is argued that this difference is due to an effect of word integrityin the interlanguage that restricts the domain of application of the transferred rules.

The study explores the psycholinguistic processes underlying L2 self-repair behavior bymeans of analyzing the timing of various types of self-corrections found in the speech of 30Hungarian speakers of English at three levels of proficiency (pre-intermediate,upper-intermediate, and advanced). The paper discusses the relevance of timing data for theexisting models of speech monitoring and examines how the level of proficiency of L2 learnersaffects the speed of error detection and the execution of correction. The results obtained indicatethat the perceptual loop theory and the activation spreading theory of monitoring both rightlyassume that monitoring involves the same mechanisms as speech comprehension. The analysis ofthe timing data reveals that corrections of pragmatically inappropriate lexical choice havedetection times very similar to those of lexical errors. This may be regarded as indirect evidencefor the claim that lexical entries in the mental lexicon also contain specifications concerning theirpragmatic value. The results show that the level of proficiency of the participants affects the timenecessary for the lexical, grammatical, and phonological encoding of the repair, which is causedby the difference in the degree of automaticity of these mechanisms at various stages of L2development.

This special issue presents results from comparative research into the principles constraininglearner varieties (interlanguages) in use. The contributors analyze the oral production of complexverbal tasks (descriptions, instructions, narratives, retellings) in L2 Dutch, English, French,German, and Italian, concentrating on the way information from different semantic domains isorganized across utterances (referential movement) and on a major aspect of the interactionbetween utterance-level and discourse-level constraints, namely, scope phenomena. We hope theresults presented here will provide insights into the structural and communicative factorspushing, or hampering, L2 acquisition and will further our understanding of how the organizingprinciples interact at different levels of discourse production, be it in L1 or L2.

Theoretical claims about the benefits of conversational interaction have been made by Gass(1997), Long (1996), Pica (1994), and others. The Interaction Hypothesis suggests thatnegotiated interaction can facilitate SLA and that one reason for this could be that, duringinteraction, learners may receive feedback on their utterances. An interesting issue, which haschallenged interactional research, concerns how learners perceive feedback and whether theirperceptions affect their subsequent L2 development. The present research addresses the first ofthese issues–learners' perceptions about interactional feedback. The study,involving 10 learners of English as a second language and 7 learners of Italian as a foreignlanguage, explores learners' perceptions about feedback provided to them throughtask-based dyadic interaction. Learners received feedback focused on a range ofmorphosyntactic, lexical, and phonological forms. After completing the tasks, learners watchedvideotapes of their previous interactions and were asked to introspect about their thoughts at thetime the original interactions were in progress. The results showed that learners were relativelyaccurate in their perceptions about lexical, semantic, and phonological feedback. However,morphosyntactic feedback was generally not perceived as such. Furthermore, the nature as wellas the content of the feedback may have affected learners' perceptions.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of pragmaticdevelopment among three groups of primary school students in Hong Kong who completed acartoon oral production task (COPT) designed to elicit requests, apologies, and complimentresponses. The first two of these speech acts are among the most well represented in thepragmatics literature and are also included in the Hong Kong English language syllabus forprimary schools. The latter has also been studied extensively but is not part of the syllabus. Datawas collected in Cantonese using the same instrument. Although a number of developmentalpatterns are revealed—particularly in choice of request strategy, frequency of supportivemoves, and use of adjuncts with apologies and compliment responses—there is littleevidence of sensitivity to situational variation or pragmatic transfer from Cantonese. This studyadds to the small, but growing, body of research on pragmatic development in a secondlanguage.

This study was designed to test the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman,1988), which states that, whereas children are known to learn language almost completelythrough (implicit) domain-specific mechanisms, adults have largely lost the ability to learn alanguage without reflecting on its structure and have to use alternative mechanisms, drawingespecially on their problem-solving capacities, to learn a second language. The hypothesisimplies that only adults with a high level of verbal analytical ability will reach near-nativecompetence in their second language, but that this ability will not be a significant predictor ofsuccess for childhood second language acquisition. A study with 57 adult Hungarian-speakingimmigrants confirmed the hypothesis in the sense that very few adult immigrants scored withinthe range of child arrivals on a grammaticality judgment test, and that the few who did had highlevels of verbal analytical ability; this ability was not a significant predictor for childhoodarrivals. This study replicates the findings of Johnson and Newport (1989) and provides anexplanation for the apparent exceptions in their study. These findings lead to areconceptualization of the Critical Period Hypothesis: If the scope of this hypothesis is limited toimplicit learning mechanisms, then it appears that there may be no exceptions to the age effectsthat the hypothesis seeks to explain.

This study considers the role of instruction, second language (L2) input, first language (L1)transfer, and Universal Grammar (UG) in the development of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge.Specifically, it investigates the acquisition of the Spanish morpheme se byEnglish-speaking adult learners. Participants included 91 university students and 30 Spanishnative-speaker controls. Learners received form-focused, communicative instruction onse for one week and were tested before, immediately following, and 24 days after thetreatment period. Assessment consisted of a grammaticality judgment task and two productiontasks using se in a variety of verb classes. The results showed that se hadbeen added to many learners' grammars, but also that L1-derived forms andovergeneralization errors had not been completely preempted. These findings are taken asevidence that the development of L2 grammars is affected by a number of independent, yetcooperating, knowledge sources, which thus supports a modular account of L2 acquisition.

Based on their longitudinal analysis of the acquisition of Dutch, English, French, andGerman, Klein and Perdue (1997) described a “basic learner variety” as validcross-linguistically and comprising a limited number of shared syntactic patterns interacting withtwo types of constraints: (a) semantic—the NP whose referent has highest control comesfirst, and (b) pragmatic—the focus expression is in final position. These authorshypothesized that “the topic-focus structure also plays an important role in some otherrespects. . . . Thus, negation and (other) scope particles occur at the topic-focus boundary”(p. 318). This poses the problem of the interaction between the core organizational principles ofthe basic variety and optional items such as negative particles and scope particles, whichsemantically affect the whole or part of the utterance in which they occur. In this article, we testthe validity of these authors' hypothesis for the acquisition of the additive scope particlealso (and its translation equivalents). Our analysis is based on the European ScienceFoundation (ESF) data originally used to define the basic variety, but we also included somemore advanced learner data from the same database. In doing so, we refer to the analyses ofDimroth and Klein (1996), which concern the interaction between scope particles and the part ofthe utterance they affect, and we make a distinction between maximal scope—that whichis potentially affected by the particle—and the actual scope of a particle in relation to anutterance in a given discourse context.

This study clarifies issues related to the transferability of bound morphology and reports onan empirical investigation of morphological transfer in the spatial expressions ofFinnish-speaking (n= 140) and Swedish-speaking (n= 70) adolescentlearners of English. The results indicate that both the bound, agglutinative morphology of the L1Finnish spatial system and the free, prepositional morphology of the L1 Swedish spatial systemconstrain the types of options that learners pursue in their L2 English spatial reference.Additionally, however, the structural and semantic differences between the two L1 systems resultin different patterns of spatial reference in the L2. We characterize these differences in terms ofsemantic transfer and simplification, and go on to show how transfer and simplification interactin our data.

This study examines the generalizability of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993b) by investigatingthe relative effect of two types of explicit grammar instruction on learners' ability tointerpret and produce sentences containing the French causative. Nine classes of 179fourth-semester French students were assigned to three groups: (a) processing instruction, (b)traditional instruction, and (c) no instruction. The results indicate that processing instruction is aseffective as traditional instruction in enabling learners to interpret the French causative and thattraditional instruction is more effective in enabling learners to produce the French causative.

This paper describes the process of acquisition in learner varieties with respect to referenceand referential movement in the domain of modality. The findings are based on data from thelongitudinal ESF and P-MoLL projects and on cross-sectional data of Italian learners of German,as well as German and Italian native speech. The theoretical framework is provided by Klein andvon Stutterheim's (e.g., 1987) “quaestio model” and their concept ofreferential movement. The concept of modality is based on Dietrich's (1992) theory ofmodality. The present findings show that, in instructional discourse, the German native speakersprefer implicit, contextual-based modal means when referring to maintained topic information inthe domain of modality, whereas in the learner varieties at least three main stages can beobserved: a phase of formulaic speech and pragmatic mode, a phase of high explicitness, and aphase of approach toward implicit reference based on (target) principles of referential movement.With the help of a new category—subquaestio—I show how, with respect to thechange of modal means, the use of explicit modal marking in German native speech generallyarises from specific local difficulties. In contrast, the use of explicit modal reference in learnervarieties remains to a large extent unaffected by whether the modal marking depends on theoverall text quaestio or on local problems.

Felix (1988) claimed to demonstrate that UG-based knowledge of grammaticality causesnonnative speakers (NNSs) to have more accurate grammaticality judgments on sentences thatare ungrammatical according to UG than on those that are grammatical. Birdsong (1994)criticized the methodology employed, noting that it ignores “response bias” (apropensity to judge sentences as ungrammatical) as a potential explanation. Felix and Zobl(1994) dismissed this criticism as merely methodological. In this paper, Birdsong'scriticism is upheld by considering a statistical model of the data. At the same time, a morecomplete logistic regression model allows a fuller statistical analysis, revealing tentative supportfor the asymmetry claim, as well as differential learning states for different constructions and atendency toward transfer avoidance. These theoretically significant effects were unnoticed in theearlier discussion of this research. For SLA research on grammaticality judgments to proceedfruitfully, appropriate statistical models need to be considered in designing the research.

This experimental study on English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages investigatesthe interaction of universal principles and L1 knowledge in interlanguage grammars by focusingon verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation (such as break inEnglish). These verbs have the same lexico-semantic composition, but differ crosslinguisticallyas to how they encode the alternation morphologically. Results of a picture judgment task showthat, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners of Turkish, Spanish, and English with different L1s rely ona universal mechanism when learning transitivity alternations. L1 influence plays a prominentrole in the morphological realization of the alternation. These findings suggest that UG and L1knowledge may not affect all linguistic domains in the same way at a given stage ofdevelopment. It is proposed that transfer is subject to modularity in interlanguage grammars.

This study investigates whether conceptualizable agents in the discourse play a role inEnglish L2 overpassivization errors (nontargetlike passivization of unaccusative verbs, a subclassof intransitives). It hypothesizes that learners are more likely to make overpassivization errors inexternally caused events (in which an agent or cause may form part of the speaker's mentalrepresentation) than in internally caused events (in which the cause or causer of the event is notclear). Advanced Chinese learners of English were asked to choose the more grammatical form(active or passive) in target sentences with unaccusative verbs. Each target sentence wasembedded in two different contexts expressing external and internal causation. A significantdifference in error rates was found between the two different contexts: Learners acceptedpassivized unaccusative verbs more frequently when an agent or cause was available than whenit was not. This finding is taken as an indication that learners transitivize unaccusative verbsbefore they passivize them and that the degree of transitivization varies depending on thepresence of conceptualizable agents in the discourse. Thus this paper argues against a purelysyntactic analysis of interlanguage errors such as overpassivization and in favor of an approachthat takes cognitive factors into account.

This paper focuses on the acquisition of linguistic devices used for discourse cohesion inChinese and French. Particular attention is paid to how two types of learners (child L1[Chinese, French] and adult L2 [Chinese learning French]) acquire thelinguistic means for marking topics, in particular French dislocation,and itsdiscourse-pragmatic functions. Data consist of narratives based on picture sequences, producedin absence of mutual knowledge. Previous studies in L2 acquisition have shown that, at earlystages, adult learners' utterances and texts are organized along semantic and pragmaticprinciples, rather than along structural ones. These principles play a preponderant role in Chineseas well. French shares this tendency with Chinese, insofar as particular utterancepatterns—dislocations—mark topic and antitopic. Results show that Frenchchildren have to acquire the discourse functions related to dislocations. Postbasic-variety adultlearners readily use French dislocations to mark—appropriately—a variety ofdiscourse-pragmatic functions. However, the adult learners quite often use forms that deviatefrom the dislocated form found in target language French. This is all the more interesting becausethe chosen forms, though not usable without a certain context in standard French, do occur incolloquial French and are clearly functionally related to the target forms.

This study is a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the effects of awareness, or thelack thereof, on 32 adult second or foreign language (L2) learners' subsequent intake andwritten production of targeted Spanish morphological forms. Think-aloud protocol data, gatheredwhile learners completed a problem-solving task (a crossword puzzle) and postexposureassessment tasks (a multiple-choice recognition task and a written production task), were used tomeasure awareness or the lack thereof, and morphological learning was assessed bylearners' performances on the two postexposure tasks. From a theoretical perspective, nodissociation between awareness and further processing of targeted forms was found in this study,the results of which are compatible with the claim that awareness plays a crucial role insubsequent processing of L2 data (e.g., Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995).From a methodological perspective, the data collection procedure clearly underscores the needfor studies that investigate the roles of attention and awareness in second language acquisition(SLA) to gather as much data as possible from different sources that reveal participants'internal processes. By attempting to ascertain what learners really attend to or are aware of, orboth, while exposed to or interacting with L2 data, such information can also address themethodological issue of how representative learners' performances in experimental groupsreally are in studies conducted under an attentional framework in SLA.

The title of this volume, Perspectives on Foreign and Second LanguagePedagogy, leads one to expect treatises on the relative merits of varying second-languageclassroom practices. Nothing could be farther from reality. It is, rather, a collection of essaysaddressing issues in second language acquisition, most with relevance to learner processes,context, and L2 development, with special emphasis on vocabulary.

Acquisition of negation in Italian as a second language (L2) is investigated on the basis ofthe longitudinal data of five learners with different first languages (L1s) in the framework of afunctional approach focusing on the semantic and pragmatic principles governing theorganization of learner varieties and the process of their complexification. Negation develops in acumulative process in four successive stages. New constructions entering into interlanguage (IL)at each stage effect reduction in frequency of use of previous constructions that specialize forspecial functions, such as constituent negation. The acquisition process provides insight intosome of the mechanisms involved in the processing and filtering of grammatical elements fromthe input and into strategies employed by the learners to integrate the expression of the scope ofnegation into the syntactic organization of their variety. The results contribute to a betterunderstanding of the acquisition processes of negation in L2s, allowing the comparison of thedevelopment of a relatively straightforward target with an invariable preverbal particle, Italian,with the better investigated development of the complex patterns of English and German.

Most of the contents of this book were published separately but have been substantiallyrevised and updated for this volume. Although the book is primarily intended for languageteachers and researchers, the publisher recommends it also to undergraduate and postgraduatestudents. For that purpose, attractive and probably effective discussion questions and activitieshave been added to each chapter.

This is the fifth volume in a renowned series edited by Dan Slobin, focusing oncross-linguistic studies of children acquiring their first language. The series is seminal for itsfocus on languages other than English and for addressing the astonishing diversity andcomplexity of the language acquisition task. Slobin notes that, in contrast to Chomskyan modelsthat consider core grammar to be the main topic of interest, the series was conceived with thenotion of showing “how much fruit there is beyond the core” (p. 14). The goal ofVolume 5 is to explore themes that were relatively backgrounded in the others. Specifically,these themes include: typological analysis, semantic systems, phonology and prosody, individualdifferences, and diachronic processes.