L2 studies demonstrate that learners differ in their speech perception patterns. Recent explanations attribute this variation to the different initial stages with which learners start their L2 development. Spanish listeners' categorization of Standard Southern British English and American English vowels is compared. The results show that, on the basis of steady-state F1 and F2 values, listeners...

Individual differences in second language (L2) aptitude have been assumed to depend upon a variety of cognitive and personality factors. Especially, the cognitive factor phonological working memory has been conceptualised as language learning device. However, strong associations between phonological working memory and L2 aptitude have been previously found in early-stage learners only, not in a...

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German & Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an on-line reading-time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. While the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners a...

In L2 development, the cognitive complexity of tasks plays a crucial role in task performance and language features produced. However, there have only been few studies addressing the impact of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and form-focused self-repairs (FFS).This study explores the role of increasing cognitive task complexity in EFL learners' form-focused attention (FF...

We investigated the perception of developmental changes in timing patterns that happen in the course of second language (L2) acquisition, provided that the native and the target languages of the learner are rhythmically similar (German and English). It was found that speech rhythm in L2 English produced by German learners becomes increasingly stress-timed as acquisition progresses. This develop...

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, or priming) to examine three domains of morphological processing (regular and irregular inflect...

This corpus-based study compares the use of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL by native speakers and Chinese learners of English. The corpora used are the written sub-corpus of ICE-GB (the British component of International Corpus of English) and CLEC (the Chinese Learner English Corpus). CLEC consists of both lowand high-proficiency L2 learners’ writing. By incorporating corpus contrastiv...

Second-language (L2) sentence processing may differ from processing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006 ). The present study challenges this hypothesis by comparing the extent to which advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English lea...

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, and priming) to examine three domains of morphological processing (regular and irregular inflec...

This study explores how Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can be used as a method to examine the lexical development of second language (L2) speakers. This year long longitudinal study with six English learners demonstrates that semantic similarity (using LSA) between utterances significantly increases as the L2 learners study English. The findings demonstrate that L2 learners begin to develop tig...