This article investigates the role in learning of rotelearned formulas or chunks. We examined data from a longitudinal study of 16 child beginner classroom learners of French for occurrences of three chunks, against which we first tried out definitional criteria. We then tracked these forms for 2 years to chart their breakdown and explore their contribution to the development of a creative language capacity. Our data showed that most of the learners not only gradually "unpacked" their early chunks, but also used parts of them productively in the generation of new utterances. These findings demonstrated that rotelearning of formulas and the construction of rules are not independent processes, but interact and actively feed into one another.

This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

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This paper argues that, on one hand, there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that interlanguage (IL) grammars are both systematically and randomly variable, and that the relationship between the two types of variation is a complex one. At any one stage of IL development, some structures may be systematically variable, but at the same time the existence of forms in free variation creates conditions conducive to systematic variation "setting in" at a later stage of development. On the other hand, the paper argues, there is no incontestable empirical evidence for free variation and concludes that the existence of free variation is based more on speculation than on empirical grounds. (Contains 14 references.) (JL)