The study of second langiage (L2) speech production has a long history in second language (SLA) research, both for what it can tell us about the development of the specific skill and how it might illuminate the general processes of SLA. Over time, studies in L2 phonological attainment have become a battleground for perennial issues in SLA research encompassing cognitive, psychological, and soci...

The lexical and phonetic mapping of auditorily confusable L2 nonwords was examined by teaching L2 learners novel words and by later examining their word recognition using an eyetracking paradigm. During word learning, two groups of highly proficient Dutch learners of English learned 20 English nonwords of which 10 contained the English contrast /ε/-/æ/ (a confusable contrast for native Dutch sp...

Contrastive analysis normally focuses on negative transfer and the rather fraught notion of standard language tends to fall short in its ability explain transfer, whether or positive. The that learners actually speak is another source downplay ignore nonstandard varieties, lects, leave out a crucial variable learning process. This paper calls for lect-inclusive perspective transfer: one recogni...

This study examines phonological and phonetic properties of contrastive referential expressions. An interactive holiday tree decoration task provided sequences of ornaments to prompt production of target noun phrases in spontaneous conversation. This paper presents an analysis of a subset of referential expressions that were uttered in contrastive discourse contexts, focusing on the production ...

The main idea of contrastive analysis, as propounded by Robert Lado in his book Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), was that it is possible to identify the areas of difficulty a particular foreign language will present for native speakers of another language by systematically comparing the two languages and cultures. Where the two languages and cultures are similar, learning difficulties will n...

Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote: "The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals t...

We present a new technique called contrastive principal component analysis (cPCA) that is designed to discover low-dimensional structure that is unique to a dataset, or enriched in one dataset relative to other data. The technique is a generalization of standard PCA, for the setting where multiple datasets are available – e.g. a treatment and a control group, or a mixed versus a homogeneous pop...

This article presents and reviews a new methodological resource for research in second language acquisition (SLA), CEDEL2 ( Corpus Escrito del Español L2 ‘L2 Spanish Written Corpus’), its free online search-engine interface cedel2.learnercorpora.com ). is multi-first-language corpus (Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic) of lear...

A fundamental question in multilingualism is whether the neural substrates are shared or segregated for the two or more languages spoken by polyglots. This study employs functional MRI to investigate the neural substrates underlying the perception of two sentence-level prosodic phenomena that occur in both Mandarin Chinese (L1) and English (L2): sentence focus (sentence-initial vs. -final posit...

There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabula...