others. The Interaction Hypothesis suggests that negotiated interaction can facilitate SLA and that one reason for this could be that, during interaction, learners may receive feedback on their utterances. An interesting issue, which has challenged interactional research, concerns how learners perceive feedback and whether their perceptions affect their subsequent L2 development. The present research addresses the first of these issues-learners' perceptions about interactional feedback. The study, involving 10 learners of English as a second language and 7 learners of Italian as a foreign language, explores learners' perceptions about feedback provided to them through task-based dyadic interaction. Learners received feedback focused on a range of morphosyntactic, lexical, and phonological forms. After completing the tasks, learners watched videotapes of their previous interactions and were asked to introspect about their thoughts at the time the original interactions were in progress. The results showed that learners were relatively accurate in Funding for part of this project was provided by a Federal Grant to establish a National Foreign Language Resource Center at Michigan State University, grant #P229A60012. We are grateful to Sarah Lemelin for her assistance with the collection and transcription of the Italian data. We are also grateful for the extremely helpful and thought-provoking comments of the anonymous SSLA reviewers, Patsy Lightbown, and Jennifer Leeman. All errors remain our own.
Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a second language, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants (perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a large part of the total variance found in acquisition order. Oral production data from 12 studies over almost 25 years, together involving 924 subjects, were pooled. Multiple regression analysis showed that a very large portion of the total variance in acquisition order is explained by the combination of the five determinants. We suggest research on other potential contributing factors and discuss the need for similar research in other languages.
Few researchers would doubt that ultimate attainment in second language grammar is negatively correlated with age of acquisition, but considerable controversy remains about the nature of this relationship: the exact shape of the age-attainment function and its interpretation. This article presents two parallel studies with native speakers of Russian: one on the acquisition of English as a second language in North America (n = 76), and one on the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language in Israel (n = 64). Despite the very different nature of the languages being learned, the two studies show very similar results. When age at testing is partialed out, the data reveal a steep decline in the learning of grammar before age 18 in both groups, followed by an essentially horizontal slope until age 40. This is interpreted as evidence in favor of the critical period. Both groups show a significant correlation between ultimate attainment and verbal aptitude for the adult learners, but not for the early learners. This is interpreted as further evidence that the learning processes in childhood and adulthood not only yield different levels of proficiency but are also different in nature.Age effects in (second) language learning are widely acknowledged, but their exact nature remains controversial, in particular, the concept of a critical period for second language acquisition (SLA). In about the last 15 years, numerous arguments against the critical period hypothesis (CPH) have been formulated: a few studies have failed to find a clear correlation between age of acquisition and ultimate attainment; many more researchers accept the negative correlation as a fact, but they argue that it is attributable to a confound between age of acquisition and one or more other variables, such as length of residence, age at testing, the nature of the input received as a function of age, the extent to which education was provided in the second language (L2) or the first language (L1), the (lack of) motivation to integrate fully with the L2 society, or simply the amount of practice
This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a ''natural'' order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated whether a combination of 5 determinants (perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for the variance in acquisition order. Oral production data from 12 studies, together involving 924 participants, were pooled to obtain weighted accuracy scores for each of 6 grammatical functors. Results of a multiple-regression analysis showed that a large portion of the total variance in acquisition order was explained by the combination of the 5 determinants. Several of these determinants, it was argued, can be seen as part of a broad conceptualization of salience.
The present study challenges the validity of elicited imitation (EI) as a measure for implicit knowledge, investigating to what extent online error detection and subsequent sentence repetition draw on implicit knowledge. To assess online detection during listening, a word monitoring component was built into an EI task. Advanced-level Japanese L2 speakers with Chinese as their native language performed the EI task with the built-in word monitoring component, a metalinguistic knowledge test, and a probabilistic serial reaction time (SRT) task, which served as a measure of aptitude for implicit learning. Results showed that EI scores were correlated positively with This study was based on the first author's qualifying paper, supported by the Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland. We would like to express our gratitude to committee members Drs. Nan Jiang and Steve Ross for their insightful suggestions and constructive advice for this project. We are grateful to Dr. Scott Kaufman for allowing us to use the serial reaction time task. We also thank Drs. Anna Chrabaszcz and Gisela Granena, whose work inspired the design of our study. The data collection was made possible by the tremendous support from the graduate programs in Teaching English as a Foreign Language and in Teaching Japanese as a Second Language at Tokyo Gakugei University. We would also like to thank the following individuals for their generous assistance in data collection: Professors Yoshiki Takayama, Misato Usukura, Kiyokata Katoh, Megumi Shimada, Isao Iori, Hiroko Yabe, Reiko Saegusa, and Takuya Goro, as well as Shintaro Akiyama and Ayako Ida. We gratefully acknowledge the constructive criticism and generous advice from the editor and anonymous Language Learning reviewers, which have greatly improved the quality of this paper.This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All original materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Yuichi Suzuki, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kanagawa University, 3-27-1, Rokkakubashi, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, Suzuki and DeKeyserElicited Imitation and Word Monitoring metalinguistic knowledge, but they were not related to the SRT scores. Word monitoring performance, in contrast, was not related to metalinguistic knowledge but correlated positively with SRT scores only among L2 speakers with longer lengths of residence. These results suggest that online error detection can index implicit knowledge, whereas EI may measure automatized explicit knowledge.
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