This study examines style shifting in the use of three past tense morphemes (regular past, irregular past, and past copula) by 17 intermediate L2 learners of English. It differs from previous studies in that style shifting is examined within a single discourse mode—narrative discourse—according to the amount of planning time made available. Data were collected under three conditions: (a) planned writing, (b) planned speech, and (c) unplanned speech. Different patterns of style shifting were observed for three morphemes, suggesting that the nature of the linguistic feature under investigation is a determining factor. For regular past, greatest accuracy was most evident in planned writing and least evident in unplanned speech, with planned speech intermediate. Little style shifting took place in irregular past, whereas style shifting for past copula occurred only between planned speech and unplanned speech. The three conditions produced different accuracy orders for regular and irregular past, suggesting that the so-called “natural” order may not be a stable phenomenon. The paper concludes with a number of important questions requiring further investigation.

In this paper, various definitions of markedness are discussed, including the difference in the assumptions underlying psychological and linguistic approaches to markedness. It is proposed that if one adopts a definition derived from theories of language learnability, then the second language learner's prior linguistic experience may predispose him or her towards transferring marked structures from the first language to the second, contrary to usual assumptions in the literature that suggest that second language learners will avoid marked forms. To test this hypothesis, adult and child learners of French as a second language were tested using grammaticality judgment tasks on two marked structures, preposition stranding and the double object construction, which are grammatical in English but ungrammatical in French, to see if they would accept French versions of these structures. It was found that the second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in French but did accept the double object construction, suggesting that transfer takes place only with one of the two marked structures. In addition, the children took tests on these structures in their native language to see if they perceived them as in any sense psycholinguistically marked. Results show that they do not treat marked and unmarked structures differently in the native language. It is suggested that the concept of markedness may cover a range of phenomena that need to be further clarified and investigated.

The development of the concept of word is discussed in terms of specific metalinguistic advantages that might be available to bilingual children when compared with their monolingual peers. Three studies are reviewed in which bilingual children show more advanced understanding of some aspects of the concept of word than do monolingual children. The specific advantages demonstrated by these three studies are summarized and related to processes in more general cognitive development.

This paper describes recent theoretical developments in cognitive psychology that can be applied to second language acquisition and uses the theory to analyze phenomena discussed regularly in the second language literature. Some limitations of linguistic theories in addressing the role of mental processes in second language acquisition are identified, and current cognitive learning theory in general is outlined. The paper then examines the theoretical model developed by John Anderson (1983, 1985) as it applies to memory representation, learning, and language skill acquisition. The remainder of the paper describes possible applications of this model to issues in second language acquisition and suggests that the theory is useful both in explaining second language acquisition processes and in identifying areas in which research is needed.

This paper examines the expression of temporality in the basilang speech (the earliest stage of second language development) of five subjects. Temporality is studied from three perspectives: morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. The first analysis determined the subjects' degree of target-like use of English morphology and demonstrated that these basilang speakers generally lack verb phrase morphology and do not have a tense system. The second analysis examined the subjects' utterances in terms of sentence-level semantics, classifying utterances according to (universal) categories such as completive versus non-completive action, habitual versus continuous action, and action versus states. The analysis showed that none of the subjects studied made tense or aspectual distinctions and that temporal marking was not accomplished by the form of the verb. The third analysis examined how temporal reference was made by the adverbials (now, tomorrow, always, prepositional phrases), serialization (the fixing of a temporal reference point and allowing the sequence of utterances to reflect the actual temporal order of reported events), calendric reference (dates, days of the week, months, and numbers), and implicit reference (temporal reference inferred from a particular context or situation). This taxonomy captured the expression of time at the basilang level of interlanguage development much better than the previous two analyses.

This paper provides a critical look at the use of mnemonic associations in vocabulary learning. The paper begins with a definition of mnemonic devices—that is, techniques for converting material to be learned into a form that makes it easier to learn and remember—and focuses on verbal and imagery mnemonics, whereby a word, a phrase, or a sentence and visual imagery serve as mediator between what is known and what is to be learned. Particular attention is given to the keyword approach, in which there is both an acoustic link between a native-language word and the second-language word, and an image of the keyword interacting with the native-language word or phrase. Contentions are discussed concerning both the learning of words through verbal and imagery mnemonics and their subsequent retrieval. Attention is also given to research issues in need of investigation.

In an empirical investigation, the results of which are reported elsewhere in greater detail (Wolff, 1985), an attempt was made to discover more about the strategies and processes specific to second language (L2) comprehension. On the assumption that information processing is of a universal cognitive nature, no differences in the cognitive processes themselves involved in first language (L1) and L2 comprehension were expected. It was, however, expected that differences would emerge in the way common strategies and processes were applied in the decoding of texts and utterances. We assumed that the differences would be of degree and not of kind, and that the extent and exploitation of these processes in L2 comprehension could be distinguished from L1 comprehension. The experimental design closely followed that developed by L1 comprehension research. A text was presented to an informant followed by the instruction to recall it. We adopted this type of experiment for two reasons: (a) It has proved its reliability in L1 research, and (b) our results could be compared to those obtained in L1 research. The similarities and differences between L1 and L2 results were thus quite easy to analyze.

The background to word association tests is described, their potential relevance to second language research considered, and the history of their use as L2 measuring instruments reviewed. A computer-controlled word association test is described, its reliability established, and its validity as a measure of language proficiency established by means of comparison with other tests.

Our main aim in this paper is to explore the interlanguage pragmatics of learners of Hebrew and English. We focus on the use of pragmatic indicators, both lexical (please/bevaqaŝa; perhaps/ulay) and grammatical (e.g., the difference between could I borrow and could you lend), with particular reference to deviations from native-speaker norms in the speech of non-native speakers. The analysis follows the analytical framework developed for the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). Data from two sets are analyzed: (a) native and non-native Hebrew, and (b) native and non-native English (with occasional reference to other CCSARP data sets). The results suggest that non-native speakers' misuse of pragmatic indicators can have serious interactional consequences, ranging from inappropriateness to pragmatic failure.

Recent perspectives on language transfer have highlighted the role of psychotypology and have given new life to Newmark's ignorance hypothesis. This paper examines such perspectives in the light of a body of data in French from a beginning learner of that language whose native language is English but who in addition has some knowledge of Irish, Latin, and Spanish. The fact that Spanish emerges as a privileged transfer source seems to point to a psychotypology factor, and certain distributional and contextual evidence appears to show that ignorance is in many cases triggering thè transfers. However, because ignorance does not seem to explain all cases, some speculation is entered into, on the basis of clues in the data, regarding the role of memory codes in transfer.

This study investigates the interrelationship of phonological similarity between L1 and L2, transfer, and markedness as they relate to the acquisition of English /ε/ and /æ/ by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Transfer and markedness adequately account for the behavior of poorer learners, but these factors do not explain the rate of acquisition of the two sounds as assessed by global foreign accent: Whereas /æ/ accuracy increased as global accent improved, /ε/ accuracy decreased. It is suggested that phonetic and phonological similarity between L1 and L2 are important factors which motivated overgeneralization or interaction of /ε/ and /æ/ within the inter-language.

Analysis of multilingual acquisition processes in the European School of Brussels reveals how both curricular and extra-curricular factors combine to account for high levels of proficiency in three or four languages. The school operates in seven languages, and all pupils must learn at least three, though the combination is open to choice. Curricular design ties in with the prerequisites for success as posited in Cummins' (1981, 1984) Interaction Hypothesis, Krashen's (1982) Input Hypothesis, and Swain's (1983) Output Hypothesis. These alone do not account for the high levels of achievement attested, because they do not include the extra-curricular factors which provide the essential supplementary conditions for active, productive use of a given language in meaningful two-way negotiation among peers. Schumann's (1979) Acculturation Model allows one to tap this primordial extra-curricular factor, even though it was not designed for an educational context. Four soft techniques were used to test the hypotheses: participant observation, written questionnaires, informal interviews, and open-ended formal interviews based on a 26-item questionnaire (N = 8). Results indicate that only Schumann's model can bring to the fore whether self-initiated meaningful two-way negotiation is used as a supplement to formal instruction in a multilingual environment; they also show how social and psychological distance tie in with curricular structure to enhance the acquisition process.

In this paper we examine some aspects of second language referential communication in an experimental setting. The research method employed is an adapted version of a dyadic communication task originally devised by Krauss and Weinheimer (1964) and subsequently used in a long series of first language studies with anglophone children and adults. The task requires subjects, who are visually separated but allowed to converse freely, to reach agreement on the ordering of a set of abstract, non-conventional shapes over a number of trials. The learners appear to behave like native speakers in many ways: They can carry out the task successfully, they shorten references on repeated use, they need less time in subsequent trials, and most importantly, they tend to prefer to describe the shapes from an analogical perspective rather than from a literal one. The differences between learners and anglophone native speakers are mainly quantitative in nature. For instance, the learners need more time and more words for the task. Also, their final references tend to be longer and structurally more complex. However, the same was true for a comparable group of Dutch native speakers. Furthermore, one learner group showed behavior that was aberrant and could not be related to proficiency level.

After an introductory discussion of the concepts of vocabulary knowledge continua and foreign-language learners' mental lexicons, the paper presents the results of a longitudinal pilot study whose aim was to make preliminary insights into vocabulary development as it takes place in an ordinary foreign-language classroom setting involving elementary-level Swedish-speaking learners of English. The results are discussed in terms of vocabulary growth in general, the learners' accessibility to words under time pressure, the relationship between “old,” well-known words and newly learned words, and finally, the stability of the learners' immediate access to words.

This paper focuses on the acquisition of new word formation devices in the target language as an indication of near-native competence at the advanced level of second language acquisition. The study reported here is based on data collected via written questionnaires consisting of three parts: (a) a production task requiring respondents to suggest innovations for nouns that have not been named in the existing lexicon; (b) an evaluation task requiring respondents to select the most appropriate innovation; (c) an interpretation task requiring respondents to interpret innovative blends. The questionnaires were administered to native speakers of Hebrew (the target language) and to two groups of learners, one advanced and the other intermediate. The findings show that the advanced group has reached a level of target language competence that enables them to produce and evaluate innovations in ways that approximate native speakers' responses, whereas the intermediate students deviate considerably from target level competence. The acquisition of word formation devices in the target language is presented as a gradual acquisition process.