This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal interface) within the same syntactic construction. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written elicitation task show that while English near-native speakers of Italian/Romanian acquired the L2 constraints on CLLD, which is [+anaphor] for Italian and [+specific] for Romanian, data from both Romanian L2 learners of Italian and Italian L2 learners of Romanian showed persistent L1 transfer effects. Target-like acquisition for these groups requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Romanian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+specific] feature and the loss of a [+anaphor] feature, while Italian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+anaphor] and the loss of a [+specific] feature. The reported findings extend evidence in favour of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis to the syntax-discourse interface, as reassembly of interpretational features associated with CLLD proved more difficult than feature acquisition. While learners at the near-native levels were able to broaden the contexts that allow a clitic in the L2 (grammatical expansion), L1 preemption difficulties were attested as well. This was the case regardless of the frequency of the relevant construction in the input and the type of L2 feature that needed to be added/removed.

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on contrastive and coarticulatory nasalized vowels in Canadian French) influenced spoken word recognition in an L2, as compared to a group of native (L1) listeners. Results from L2 listeners (English-native speakers) indicated that fine-grained phonetics impacted the recognition of words, i.e. they were able to use nasalization duration variability in a way similar to L1-French listeners, providing evidence that lexical representations can be highly specified in an L2. Specifically, L2 listeners were able to distinguish minimal word pairs (differentiated by the presence of phonological vowel nasalization in French) and were able to use variability in a way approximating L1-French listeners. Furthermore, the robustness of the French "nasal vowel" category in L2 listeners depended on age of exposure. Early bilinguals displayed greater sensitivity to some ambiguity in the stimuli than late bilinguals, suggesting that early bilinguals had greater sensitivity to small variations in the signal and thus better knowledge of the phonetic cue associated with phonological vowel nasalization in French, similarly to L1 listeners.

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice L2 learners accomplish reference tracking in American Sign Language (ASL), and whether they transfer strategies from gesture. Our results revealed limited evidence of over-explicitness. Instead there was an overall similarity in the L2 learners' reference tracking to that of a native signer control group, even in the use of lexical nominals, pronouns and zero anaphora - areas where research on spoken L2 reference tracking predicts differences. Our data also revealed, however, that L2 learners have problems with the referential value of ASL classifiers, and with target-like use of zero anaphora from different verb types, as well as spatial modification. This suggests that over-explicitness occurs in the early stages of different modality L2 acquisition to a limited extent. We found no evidence of gestural transfer. Finally, we found that L2 learners reintroduce more than native signers, which could indicate that they, unlike native signers are not yet capable of utilizing the affordances of the visual modality to reference multiple entities simultaneously.

Speech of late bilinguals has frequently been described in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from the native language (L1) to the second language (L2), but CLI from the L2 to the L1 has received relatively little attention. This article addresses L2 attainment and L1 attrition in voicing systems through measures of voice onset time (VOT) in two groups of Dutch-German late bilinguals in the Netherlands. One group comprises native speakers of Dutch and the other group comprises native speakers of German, and the two groups further differ in their degree of L2 immersion. The L1-German-L2-Dutch bilinguals ( = 23) are exposed to their L2 at home and outside the home, and the L1-Dutch-L2-German bilinguals ( = 18) are only exposed to their L2 at home. We tested L2 attainment by comparing the bilinguals' L2 to the other bilinguals' L1, and L1 attrition by comparing the bilinguals' L1 to Dutch monolinguals ( = 29) and German monolinguals ( = 27). Our findings indicate that complete L2 immersion may be advantageous in L2 acquisition, but at the same time it may cause L1 phonetic attrition. We discuss how the results match the predictions made by Flege's Speech Learning Model and explore how far bilinguals' success in acquiring L2 VOT and maintaining L1 VOT depends on the immersion context, articulatory constraints and the risk of sounding foreign accented.

Recent evidence demonstrates that American Sign Language signs are active during print word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are highly proficient in both ASL and English. In the present study, we investigate whether signs are active during print word recognition in two groups of unbalanced bilinguals: deaf ASL-dominant and hearing English-dominant bilinguals. Participants judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated English word pairs had phonologically related translations in ASL, but participants were never shown any ASL signs during the experiment. Deaf ASL-dominant bilinguals (Experiment 1) were faster when semantically related English word pairs had similar form translations in ASL, but slower when semantically unrelated words had similar form translations in ASL, indicating that ASL signs are engaged during English print word recognition in these ASL-dominant signers. Hearing English-dominant bilinguals (Experiment 2) were also slower to respond to semantically unrelated English word pairs with similar form translations in ASL, but no facilitation effects were observed in this population. The results provide evidence that the interactive nature of lexical processing in bilinguals is impervious to language modality.

Adults tend to perceive speech sounds from their native language as members of distinct and stable categories; however, they fail to perceive differences between many non-native speech sounds without a great deal of training. The present study investigates the effects of categorization training on adults' ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts. It was hypothesized that only individuals who successfully learned the appropriate categories would show selective improvements in discriminating between-category contrasts. Participants were trained to categorize progressively narrow phonetic contrasts across one of two non-native boundaries, with discrimination pre- and post-tests completed to measure the effects of training on participants' perceptual sensitivity. Results suggest that changes in adults' ability to discriminate a non-native contrast depend on their successful learning of the relevant category structure. Furthermore, post-training identification functions show that changes in perceptual categories specifically correspond to their relative placement of the category boundary. Taken together, these results indicate that learning to assign category labels to a non-native speech continuum is sufficient to induce discontinuous perception of between- versus within-category contrasts.

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 Beginning Spanish Lexicon. The present report describes the words contained in this web-accessible resource, and the information about those words provided by the interface. This information is freely accessible at: http://www.people.ku.edu/~mvitevit/BegSpanLex.html.

Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.