This commentary discusses the recent keynote article in "Second Language Research" by Westergaard (2021), which extends the Micro-cue Model to second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary comments on such questions as: What makes a given property easy or hard to acquire? How do learners determine similarity?…

Purpose: This study investigated whether maximum speech performance, more specifically, the ability to rapidly alternate between similar syllables during speech production, is associated with executive control abilities in a nonclinical young adult population. Method: Seventy-eight young adult participants completed two speech tasks, both…

This introductory article will illustrate how ergonomics has come to occupy a prominent place in translation and interpreting studies. It will review the studies that have been carried out in recent years to measure physical, cognitive and organisational conditions within the language industry. It will be argued that, despite the growing awareness…

People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

Two visual world experiments investigated the priming of form (e.g., phonology) during language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard high cloze probability sentences like "In order to have a closer look, the dentist asked the man to open his . . ." while viewing visual arrays with objects like a predictable target mouth,…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form's linguistic and frequency distribution in second language…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

The COVID-19 pandemic considerably altered the English Language Teaching (ELT) milieu . Hence, this bibliometric study was conducted to sketch a broad description of the ELT research during the outbreak and reveal the conceptual, intellectual, and social structure of the field. The Scopus database was consulted to find journal articles published…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48 native Spanish speakers whose foreign language was English. They viewed four emotionally negative, four positive, and four neutral videos that, in total, contained 48 emotionally valenced…

Unlike traditional methods, the communicative approaches draw on implicit and incidental ways of learning and contextualised exercises of grammar which improve language performance in terms of fluency and communicative competence. However, the discursive plan implies the use of high-level units of knowledge and the automatization of low-level…

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs.…

We tested the frequent assumption that the difficulty of word retrieval increases when a speaker is being observed and evaluated. We modified the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) so that participants believed that its evaluative observation components continued throughout the duration of a subsequent word retrieval task, and measured participants'…

Purpose: The purpose of this letter is to clarify the psycholinguistic underpinnings of the tense marker total and tense agreement productivity score and to extend the discussion of when composite diversity and productivity measures are best used. Conclusion: We encourage the use of composite diversity and productivity measures when assessing…