The authors believe that exposure to cultural diversity may force children (or even adults) to form new neural connections in the brain to be able to sufficiently interpret meaning in things to which they are not accustomed. Once formed, these new neural connections may be at one's permanent disposal to assist in a myriad of potential cognitive…

After 18 months of research and many practice sessions, Sponge opened in the fall of 2005. This year, Sponge will provide language classes for over 350 children from newborn to seven years in the Seattle area. This language program offers Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese--all taught by native speakers. While the staff sets out to create a…

The aim of this chapter, which is written from the perspective of psycholinguistic SLA research, is to establish a possible relationship between representations, processes and mechanisms of second language learning and knowledge as defined from within psycholinguistic SLA on the one hand, and the more behavioural performance outcomes such as…

This paper examines the impact of task complexity on L2 production. The study increases task complexity by progressively removing pre-task planning time and increasing the number of elements. The combined effects of manipulating these two variables of task complexity simultaneously are also analyzed. Using a repeated measures design, 42…

The present longitudinal case study investigated the development of fluency, complexity and accuracy--and the possible relationships between them--in the written production of L2 French. We assessed fluency and complexity in five intermediate learners by means of conventional indicators for written L2 (cf. Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), while…

One of the most enduring questions in the field of bilingualism is whether bilingual infants and children initially have one language system or two. Research with adults indicates that, while bilinguals do not represent their languages in two fully encapsulated language systems, they are able to functionally differentiate their languages. This…

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…

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)…

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…

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…

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories--the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1…

Although fluency constitutes an essential component of second language (L2) proficiency, there are mixed results and gaps in the literature on how L2 speakers' fluency differs from fluent speech production in a first language (L1). The research reported in this article investigated utterance fluency and cognitive fluency of L1 English…

In this article, I explore how connectionism might expand its role in second language acquisition (SLA) theory by showing how some symbolic models of bilingual and second language lexical memory can be reduced to a biologically realistic (i.e., neurally plausible) connectionist model. This integration or hybridization of the two models follows the…

Language aptitude has been hypothesized as a factor that can compensate for postcritical period effects in language learning capacity. However, previous research has primarily focused on instructed contexts and rarely on acquisition-rich learning environments where there is a potential for massive amounts of input. In addition, the studies…