This study analyzed phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and working memory (WM) and their relationship with vocabulary and grammar learning in an artificial foreign language. Nonword repetition, nonword recognition, and listening span were used as memory measures. Participants learned the singular forms of vocabulary for an artificial foreign language before being exposed to plural forms in sentence contexts. Participants were tested on their ability to induce the grammatical forms and to generalize the forms to novel utterances. Individual differences in final abilities in vocabulary and grammar correlated between 0.44 and 0.76, depending on the measure. Despite these strong associations, the results demonstrated significant independent effects of PSTM and WM on L2 vocabulary learning and on L2 grammar learning, some of which were mediated by vocabulary and some of which were direct effects.

This paper investigates the limited attainment of adult compared to child language acquisition in terms of learned attention to morphological cues. It replicates Ellis and Sagarra in demonstrating short-term learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in Latin, and it extends the investigation using eye-tracking indicators to determine the extent to which these biases are overt or covert. English native speakers learned adverbial and morphological cues to temporal reference in a small set of Latin phrases under experimental conditions. Comprehension and production data demonstrated that early experience with adverbial cues enhanced subsequent use of this cue dimension and blocked the acquisition of verbal tense morphology. Effects of early experience of verbal morphology were less pronounced. Eye-tracking measures showed that early experience of particular cue dimensions affected what participants overtly focused upon during subsequent language processing and how this overt study resulted in turn in covert attentional biases in comprehension and in productive knowledge.Naturalistic second language acquisition (L2A) tends not to reach nativelike ability. Although it may be sufficient for everyday communicative purposes, adultacquired language predominantly includes nouns, verbs, and adverbs with closedclass items, in particular grammatical morphemes and prepositions, that fail to be put to full nativelike use (

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Typically concrete words are learned better than abstract words (Kaushanskaya & Rechtzigel, 2012), and nouns are learned better than verbs (Kauschke & Stenneken, 2008). However, most studies on concreteness have not manipulated grammatical class (and vice versa), leaving the relationship between the two unclear. Therefore, in two experiments we examined the effects of grammatical class and concreteness simultaneously in foreign language vocabulary learning. In Experiment 1, English speakers learned ‘foreign language’ words (English pseudowords) mapped to concrete and abstract nouns and verbs. In Experiment 2, English speakers learned German words with the same procedure. Overall, the typical advantages for concrete words and nouns were observed. Hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence that the grammatical class effect is separable from the concreteness effect. This result challenges a strict concreteness-based source of noun/verb differences. The results also suggest that the influences of concreteness and grammatical class may vary across language measures and tasks.