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Talamas et al. (1999), Ferré et al. (2006) and Sunderman and Kroll (2006) exposed participants to first-language/second-language (L1/L2) pairs of words and asked them to decide whether the second word was the correct translation of the first. In the critical condition, the L2 word was either the translation of the L1 word (man à hombre) or a form-relative of the translation (man à hambre). Less fluent speakers showed higher recognition latencies in the form-relative condition than did more fluent speakers. This report explores whether an appropriately trained Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural network (Carpenter and Grossberg, 1987a) will suffer from form-relative interference, and the role of vigilance (a parameter of low-level attention sensitive to environmental complexity) in this effect. I argue that the learning environment of early bilinguals is more complex than that of adult L2 learners, and therefore adult learners may be less vigilant to word form. ART2 networks were trained with English and Spanish corpora under conditions emulating early and late second language acquisition at different vigilance levels and then serially exposed to the same types of word pairs used in the three studies mentioned above. Form-relative interference was observed, indicating that low-level attentional mechanisms may play a role in second language lexical learning and access.

To some extent, we seem to use language in chunks – multiple words that are co-selected and used as gestalt units. By some estimates, these chunks constitute more than 50 percent of a given text ( Erman and Warren, 2000 ). The extent to which our communication is composed of these units has broad implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistics and applied linguistics, and so is the focus of this study. This study shows that claims made regarding the nature of formulaic language ( Sinclair, 1991 ) lead to a method for the automatic detection of holistically used multi-word patterns in text corpora, which in turn allows for the estimation of the ‘chunkiness’ of linguistic corpora. These estimates may be useful for materials development in language teaching, as well as corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic studies.