This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue. Multiple Grammars advances the claim that optionality is a constitutive characteristic of any one grammar, with interlanguage grammars being perhaps the clearest examples of a…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammar (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and touches on other second language acquisition research. Topics discussed include the concept of second language (L2) optionality, a hypothesis regarding the acquisition of the…

This article offers commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue. It argues that more precise definitions are needed for the terms "rule," "simple," and "productive." Topics discussed include Amaral and Roeper's verb second (V2) rule,…

Amaral & Roeper's Multiple Grammars (MG) proposal offers an appealingly simple way of thinking about the linguistic representations of bilingual speakers. This article presents a commentary on the MG language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue, focusing on the theory's implications for child…

This article offers commentary that the Multiple Grammar (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper (A&R) in the present issue lacks elaboration of the psychological mechanisms at work in second language acquisition. Topics discussed include optionality in a speaker's grammar and the rules of verb position in…

This article examines the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and presents a critique of the research that went into the theory. Topics discussed include the allegation that the bilinguals and second language learners in the original article are primarily students in an academic setting, Amaral…

In this commentary, the author defends the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roepe (A&R) in the present issue. Topics discussed include second language acquisition, the concept of developmental optionality, and the idea that structural decisions involve the lexical dimension. The author states that A&R's…

A number of resources provide psycholinguistic researchers with information about the words that the typical child or adult knows in a variety of languages. What is currently not available is a resource that provides information about the words that a typical adult learning a foreign language knows. We created such a resource for Spanish: The…

In this article, a survey of current psycholinguistic techniques relevant to second language acquisition (SLA) research is presented. I summarize many of the available methods and discuss their use with particular reference to two critical questions in current SLA research: (1) What does a learner's current knowledge of the second language (L2)…

As in any field of scientific inquiry, advancements in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) rely in part on the interpretation and generalizability of study findings using quantitative data analysis and inferential statistics. While statistical techniques such as ANOVA and t-tests are widely used in second language research, this review…

Neuroimaging techniques are becoming not only more and more sophisticated but are also coming to be increasingly accessible to researchers. One thing that one should take note of is the potential of neuroimaging research within second language acquisition (SLA) to contribute to issues pertaining to the plasticity of the adult brain and to general…

The novelty of Lardiere's proposal does not reside in her so-called "rehabilitation" of Contrastive Analysis. In generative second language acquisition research, appeal to the best available analyses and descriptions of the languages under investigation has always been a top priority, whether the focus was parameters, functional categories or…

In this article I discuss the selection and assembly of formal features in second language acquisition. Assembling the particular lexical items of a second language (L2) requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the first language (L1) into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of…

The second language acquisition (SLA) literature reports numerous studies of proficient second language (L2) speakers who diverge significantly from native speakers despite the evidence offered by the L2 input. Recent SLA theories have attempted to account for native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) divergence by arguing for the dissociation…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language processing.…