Studies of phonological development that combine speech-processing experiments with observation and analysis of production remain rare, although production experience is necessarily relevant to developmental advance. Here we focus on three proposals regarding the relationship of production to word learning: (1) "Articulatory filter": The…

A growing research line documents significant bivariate correlations between individual measures of speech perception gathered in infancy and concurrent or later vocabulary size. One interpretation of this correlation is that it reflects language specificity: Both speech perception tasks and the development of the vocabulary recruit the…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues…

Duration-based auditory grouping preferences are presumably shaped by language experience in adults and infants, unlike intensity-based grouping that is governed by a universal bias of a loud-soft preference. It has been proposed that duration-based rhythmic grouping preferences develop as a function of native language phrasal prosody.…

In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty-four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic…

Infants often pay special attention to speech sounds, and they appear to detect key features of these sounds. To investigate the neural foundation of speech perception in infants, we measured cortical activation using near-infrared spectroscopy. We presented the following three types of auditory stimuli while 3-month-old infants watched a silent…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

Definite expressions may be used to introduce a referent into discourse when their familiarity between speaker and listener can be inferred, a strategy known as bridging. However, for a number of reasons, bridging may be difficult to acquire compared to the acquisition of indefinite introductions for noninferable referent types, with the native…

The study aimed to identify different second language (L2) learner motivational types drawing on the framework of the L2 motivational self system. A total of 1,278 secondary school students learning English in Iran completed a questionnaire survey. Cluster analysis yielded five different groups based on the strength of different variables within…

We present the outcomes of a pronunciation training program conducted in a workplace setting with second language speakers who had lived in an English-speaking environment for an average of 19 years. The research questions concerned whether improvement would occur in the learners' perception of certain segments and prosody; in the…

In this article, we investigate the integration of concept-based pragmatics instruction, grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, in an intact second-semester French class (n = 13) over the course of an academic term. Our focus is on learners' appropriation of the concepts of self-presentation, social distance, and power with respect…

Where native speakers supposedly are fluent by default, nonnative speakers often have to strive hard to achieve a nativelike fluency level. However, disfluencies (such as pauses, fillers, repairs, etc.) occur in both native and nonnative speech and it is as yet unclear how fluency raters weigh the fluency characteristics of native and nonnative…

This investigation examined two techniques that may help learners focus on second language (L2) constructions when recasts are provided during meaning-based communicative activities: altering the cognitive complexity of tasks and manipulating the input frequency distributions of target constructions. We first independently assessed the validity of…

Research on second language (L2) communication strategies over the past three decades has concerned itself broadly with defining their usage in terms of planning and compensation, as well as with the use of taxonomies for coding different types of strategies. Taking a Conversation Analytic (CA) perspective, this article examines the fine-grained…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…