This thematic issue explores various aspects of interlanguage phonetics and phonology andtheir relationship to general linguistic theory. Research in interlanguage syntax and recently indiscourse and pragmatics has been quite prolific; however, research in interlanguage phoneticsand phonology has produced far fewer studies. Of the nearly 200 articles published inStudies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) during the last 10 years,onlyabout a dozen focus on phonetics and phonology. This thematic issue is intended to fill some ofthis gap.

The relationship between prior knowledge of and interest in a topic is complex. Althoughknowledge and interest may often go hand in hand, they do not necessarily correlate. Thepurpose of this study was to separate the effects of prior knowledge and topic interest on secondlanguage reading comprehension. Participants in the study were 104 students of English as asecond language in an English-for-academic-purposes program at a large American university.On the basis of a prior-knowledge test and a topic-interest inventory, each student read passagesand took multiple-choice comprehension tests on topics for which they had all four possiblecombinations of high and low topic interest and high and low prior knowledge. Results on thereading comprehension measure for the two main effects of prior knowledge and topic interest,although in the expected direction, did not reach significance, possibly because of a significantinteraction between those two variables. There was also a significant effect for Englishproficiency level, as well as a significant interaction between interest and gender, with malesmore influenced by high topic interest than females. Our results are compared to those of otherfirst and second language studies that have explicitly investigated the interrelationships amongtopic interest, prior knowledge, and gender.

On April 23rd of this year, at the initiative of the current group of editorial assistants(Elizabeth Grace Winkler, Llorenç Comajoan, and Donald F. Reindl), a symposium wasorganized on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University to celebrate the 20th anniversary ofSSLA's founding. Presentations on the past, present, and future state ofresearch on second language acquisition were presented by Editorial Board and AdvisoryCommittee members Susan Gass, John Schumann, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, and PatsyLightbown. It is noteworthy that this commemorative event, the creation of SSLA,would not have taken place without the direct intervention of another group of graduate students,the Indiana University Linguistics Club. Without the IULC producing and disseminating thefledgling publication that was SSLA in 1978, the journal would never have made itbeyond the drawing board. In this note prefacing the last issue of Volume 20, I would like tonarrate the conditions of SSLA's birth and comment on the journal'scontribution to second language acquisition research.

This paper reports the results of a study of the intonation of 18 Mandarin Chinese speakerslecturing in English. As a basis for the study, it is proposed that intonation be considered agrammar of cohesion in English discourse: Drawing from the intonational model ofPierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), it is argued that discrete morphemes of intonationcorrespond to the categories of cohesion in Halliday and Hasan's (1976) typology. Thestudy investigated the hypothesis that the nonnative speakers who were able to use the intonationsystem of English most effectively would score higher on a global language test. Using aComputerized Speech Lab to measure pitch, four aspects of intonation were averaged for eachspeaker: (a) the pitch difference between newly introduced content words and function words, (b)the use of high pitch at phrase boundaries to link related constituents, (c) the use of pitch todistinguish contrasting items from given items, and (d) the paratone or increase inpitch range at rhetorical junctures to signal topic shift. These four measures were chosen for theircontribution to the cohesion of the lectures. Multiple regression analysis indicates that the fourthintonation variable, the paratone, was a significant predictor of these subjects' English testscores. Examples are given of the other variables in context from both low- and high-scoringspeakers. It is emphasized that intonation is not only a stylistic component of accent but also ameaning-bearing grammatical system.

This paper presents results of aresponse-latency (RL) experiment with English-speaking learners of German that investigated towhat extent—if any—two different groups of second language (L2) learners permitraising of the thematic verb. The framework under which the study was conducted involvesvarying theoretical predictions derived from the native-language (NL) transfer view of Schwartzand Sprouse (1994, 1996), the gradual-development view of Vainikka and Young-Scholten(1994, 1996), the underspecification view of Eubank (1993/1994), and a local-impairmentview that presents a more parsimonious solution to the L2 developmental problem than standard“no access” views. The L2 results reported here show that learners respond indifferent ways to stimulus sentences with raised and unraised verbs depending on thesubjects' level of development. Surprisingly, it is the less advanced learners who exhibitan RL preference for apparently raised-verb experimental stimuli; the more advanced learners donot differentiate between raised-verb and unraised-verb stimuli. Analysis of these findingsreveals that the less advanced group may only project VPs, consistent with thegradual-development view of Vainikka and Young-Scholten. Crucially, however, the LocalImpairment Hypothesis is the only view that is consistent with the results from the moreadvanced learners, especially when they are seen in developmental context.

Two hypotheses regarding the distribution of emergent tense-aspect morphology in SLAhave been proposed: the aspect hypothesis, which claims the distribution of interlanguage verbalmorphology is determined by lexical aspectual class, and the discourse hypothesis, which claimsit is determined by narrative structure. Recent studies have tested and supported both hypothesesindividually. This study expands the investigation to include an analysis of both narrativestructure and lexical aspectual class in a single corpus comprising 74 narratives (37 oral andwritten pairs) produced by adult learners of English as a second language at various proficiencylevels. The results suggest that both hypotheses are necessary to account for the distribution ofverbal morphology in interlanguage.

This paper seeks to resolve certain questions pertaining to therelationship between gender and second language vocabulary knowledge. One question weexamine is whether female and male ESL students at the University of California at Irvinediffer significantly in their knowledge of academic vocabulary in English as measured byscores on the Test of Academic Lexicon (TAL). One hundred ninety-two freshman universityESL students participated in the study. A t test, used to investigate differences in theTAL scores of males and females, reveals that the males performed better on the TAL than thefemales (t = 3.32, p = .001). Analyses of covariance were used to examinequestions pertaining to the effect of gender on the TAL, controlling for the possible effects ofthe students' verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, length of residence in theUnited States, and age of arrival in the United States. In all cases, gender remainssignificantly related to the results of the TAL when controlling for the other variable: forverbal SAT scores, F(1,181) = 5.86, p < .05; for length of residence,F(1,187) = 9.64, p < .01; and for age of arrival in the United States,F(1,185) = 10.22, p < .005. Neither the present study nor the genderliterature reviewed suggests that gender itself causes differences in the TAL scores.In analyzing the results, we consider possible explanations for the males' better TALscores related to reading habits, interactional styles, educational backgrounds, andcultures.

The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English andMandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and asentence-transcription (dictee) task. Ten advanced-level ESL learners and a comparison group ofnative English speakers read a set of simple true or false statements. These were presented inquiet and noisy conditions to 24 native English listeners who assessed their truth value and wroteout the utterances they heard. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects ofnoise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. In fact, of the set of items thatwere verified perfectly in the noise-free condition, the Mandarin-accented ones were significantlyless well verified in noise than the native English ones were. A large degree of interspeakervariability was also noted, particularly for the Mandarin speakers.

This study investigates children's changing sensitivity to processing cues foridentifying agent (word order, case marking, and animacy) as a function of proficiency in asecond language. English-speaking learners of Japanese need to appropriately adjust cuestrengths in moving from a rigid SVO language to one in which SOV word order is a goodgeneral processing strategy, but case marking must ultimately be relied on if it conflicts with thisorder. English-speaking children in grades K–7 in an immersion school were asked toidentify the agent for a set of audiotaped sentences in English and Japanese. The children in thisstudy learned to use SOV word order, lexical semantics, and canonical case marking, but they donot provide evidence of appropriately exploiting noncanonical case marking. We suggest thatthese results might be accounted for by the context in which input is processed in immersionschool classrooms.

Voice onset time (VOT) was measured in the production of /t/ in the initial positionof 60 English words spoken by native English (NE) speakers and native Spanish (NS) speakerswho began learning English before or after the age of 21 years. The subjects rated the words forfamiliarity, age of acquisition, imageability, and relatedness to word(s) in the Spanish lexicon.The subjects in all three groups showed two well-known phonetic effects: They produced longerVOT values in the context of high than nonhigh vowels, and longer VOT in one- than intwo-syllable words. As expected, the NS subjects who learned English prior to the age of 21years judged the English words to be more familiar and more like a Spanish word than did thesubjects who began learning English later in life. Also, many but not all of the NS subjectsproduced /t/ with shorter VOT values than did the NE subjects. However, regressionanalyses showed that none of the lexical factors mentioned above or the text frequency of the 60English words examined affected the NS subjects' VOT values. Thus, variation in theaccuracy with which NS subjects produce English /t/ must be accounted for by factorsother than the lexical status of the words in which /t/ occurs.

This study examines aspects of communicative classroomdiscourse that may affect the potential of recasts to be noticed as negative evidence by youngsecond language learners. The database comprises transcripts of over 18 hours of interactionrecorded during 27 lessons in 4 immersion classrooms at the primary level. The 377 recasts inthe database have been classified according to their pragmatic functions in classroomdiscourse and then compared to the teachers' even more frequent use of noncorrectiverepetition. Findings reveal that recasts and noncorrective repetition fulfill identical functionsdistributed in equal proportions and, furthermore, that teachers frequently use positivefeedback to express approval of the content of learners' messages, irrespective ofwell-formedness, to accompany, also in equal proportions, recasts, noncorrective repetition,and even topic-continuation moves following errors. The findings suggest that, from theperspective of both learners and teachers, the corrective reformulations entailed in recastsmay easily be overridden by their functional properties in meaning-oriented classrooms.

This paper investigates the various waysspeakers manage problems and overcome difficulties in L2 communication. FollowingDörnyei and Scott (1997), we distinguish four main sources of L2 communicationproblems: (a) resource deficits, (b) processing time pressure, (c) perceived deficiencies inone's own language output, and (d) perceived deficiencies in the interlocutor'sperformance. In order to provide a systematic description of the wide range of copingmechanisms associated with these problem areas (e.g., communication strategies, meaningnegotiation mechanisms, hesitation devices, repair mechanisms), we adopt a psycholinguisticapproach based on Levelt's (1989, 1993, 1995) model of speech production.Problem-solving devices, then, are analyzed and classified according to how they are related tothe different pre- and post-articulatory phases of speech processing, and we illustrate the variousmechanisms by examples and retrospective comments taken from L2 learners' data.

This study investigated the acquisition of the comprehension of overt morphological casemarking by adult native speakers of English who were learning Russian or German as a secondlanguage (L2). The Russian case-marking system is more complex than the German system, butit almost always provides the listener with case inflections that are reliable cues to sentenceinterpretation. Two approaches to learning of inflectional morphology were contrasted: therule-based approach, which predicts that learning is determined by paradigm complexity; and theassociative approach, which predicts that learning is determined by the cue validity of individualinflections. A computerized picture-choice task probed the comprehension of L2 learners byvarying the cues of case marking, noun configuration, and noun animacy. The resultsdemonstrated that learners of Russian use case marking much earlier than learners of Germanand that learners of German rely more on animacy to supplement the weaker case-marking cue.In order to further explore the underlying mechanisms of learning, a connectionist model wasdeveloped that correctly simulated the obtained results. Together, these findings support the viewthat adult L2 learning is associative and driven by the validity of cues in the input.

Second language acquisition theoryconventionally represents itself as having been invented ex nihilo in the last decadesof the twentieth century. This article investigates the nature of this largely unexamineddisciplinary self-concept and questions its validity. I dispute arguments that might be formulatedto support the notion that SLA theory has no relevant earlier history, enumerate some of theunfortunate consequences of maintaining this belief, and speculate about benefits to the field thatmight accrue from abandoning it. Instead of presenting SLA theory as having its origin in the last20 or 30 years, I suggest that we need to look for ways to identify, investigate, and eventuallyreconceptualize its true history.

In this paper, I address the nature of the mental representation of an interlanguage grammar.The focus will be on the necessity of positing some sort of hierarchical constituent structure toaccount for L2 phonology. I discuss relevant data from the domains of the acquisition ofsegments, syllables, moras, and metrical structure. The interaction of these domains isdiscussed.

In addition, I look at the acquisition of onset clusters and argue that the acquisition of liquidsis correlated with the acquisition of consonantal sequences. Evidence from language change,language typology, and language acquisition suggests that there is a causal relationship betweenthe two. The theoretical framework of feature geometry and derived sonority gives us theapparatus to explain what the second-language learners are doing.

This articlereports on a study that investigated the effect of different amounts of planning time on thespeech performance of L2 speakers. Subjects were 4 groups of learners of German (31 intotal) performing 2 tasks each. The tasks varied in the degree of structure they contained andthe familiarity of information they tapped. The control group had no planning time available;the 3 experimental groups had 1, 5, and 10 minutes of planning time, respectively, before theystarted speaking. Results show fluency and lexical density of speech increase as a function ofplanning time. Accuracy of speech improved with only 1 minute planning but did not increasewith more planning time. Complexity of speech was significantly higher for the 10-minuteplanning condition only. No significant differences were found for the effect of planning onthe different tasks. This study employed various general and specific constructs for measuringfluency, complexity, and accuracy of speech. The interrelationships and qualities of thesemeasures are also investigated and discussed.

In our reply to Margaret Thomas's article “Programmaticahistoricity in second language acquisition theory,” we first review pertinent literature,concluding that historical awareness is evident in SLA, though it is not as far-reaching asThomas would like it to be. We then argue that the attitude of most scholars in SLA toward thepast is reasonable given that no significant work in SLA from antiquity has beendiscovered—by Thomas or anyone else—and that if such work exists Thomas hasthe burden to bring it to light before declaring the field guilty of ahistoricity. We consider variousways to define the field of SLA, arguing that it should be defined theoretically first, andhistorically second. We claim that the point at which SLA separated itself from languageteaching is a logical point from which to date the beginnings of SLA as a true discipline. Weconsider and reject Thomas's comparison of SLA and its history to various other scientificdisciplines and their histories, arguing that these disciplines have true milestones to point to inthe distant past, whereas SLA does not. Although we agree with Thomas that a generalawareness of the history of philosophy and science is beneficial for scholars in all fields, wemake a sharp division between that history and the history of SLA proper. We conclude byarguing that respect for the field of SLA can come only through sound scientific progress, not byappeals to history.

This study assessed global foreign accent in sentences and the production of two Englishconsonants, /[upside-down r]/ and /l/, by 11 Japanese college students duringtheir freshman and senior years (T1, T2). In Experiment 1, native English-speaking listenersrated five sentences spoken by the Japanese speakers and five native English control speakers.Experiments 2 and 3 examined 25 word onsets containing /[upside-down r]/ and/l/. Auditory evaluations by native English-speaking listeners were used to determine:(a) to what extent the consonants produced could be identified as intended at T1 and T2; and (b)whether /[upside-down r]/ and /l/ were produced more accurately at T2 thanat T1. The results provided little support for a markedness hypothesis based on statisticalfrequencies and mixed support for a hypothesis based on perception studies. Some speakersmade significant improvement, however, in both global foreign accent and liquid identifiabilityand accuracy.

This book concentrates on the way young children'sspeech may vary between the pronouns I, my, and me as thesubject of a sentence. For example, one child in the study at 30 months of age alternatedbetween my and I as the subject form, as seen in these two utterances (p.73):

(1) I like Anna,

(2) My like vanilla.

Thefundamental claim is that such variation is motivated and principled. The author writes:

One might want to claim instead that the children were simply confused about thedistinctions between various self-reference forms and thus might use them in free variation.(p. 58)

No one has ever claimed that children were “simply confused”when they made pronoun Case errors, and this book's lack of attention to opposingexplanations for pronoun Case errors is a major flaw. For those interested in learning moreabout the phenomenon some important citations are Chiat (1981), Loeb and Leonard (1991),Powers (1995), Rispoli (1994), Schutze and Wexler (1996), and Vainikka (1994). Loeb andLeonard (1991), Powers (1995), and Schutze and Wexler (1996) hold that the child'sinability to accurately assign Case leads to these errors as well as a host of simultaneouslyoccurring phenomena such as inaccurate production of agreement and tense marking. Rispoli(1994) views these errors as the result of paradigm building.

How transparent a title is Genesee and Upshur's (G & U) Classroom-BasedEvaluation in Second Language Education? First, the word “evaluation.”These days “evaluation” is so commonly attached collocationally to programs andprojects that when it stands alone it is usually taken to mean evaluation of programs or projects.G & U seem to use evaluation in the more micro sense of the assessment of individualachievement within the classroom context, taking into account the teacher's purposes,plans, and practices.