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This paper offers a number of refinements to Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework for investigating cross-linguistic effects. According to the original framework, there are three potential consequences of cross-linguistic effects, and any compelling argument for or against the presence of such effects must be based on a consideration of all three consequences. These consequences can be thought of as types of evidence, or premises for transfer, and their investigation requires performance comparisons between individuals, groups, and languages. The present paper has two purposes. The first is to characterize the foundations of a classification scheme that highlights the relationships among these three types of evidence and also indicates that there is yet a fourth type of evidence for cross-linguistic effects that has not yet been taken account of within the framework. The second purpose of this paper is to show that these four types of evidence constitute what can be described as a comparison-based argument for transfer, but that there also exist other valid arguments for transfer, such as what I refer to as the detection-based argument. I describe both the comparison- and detection-based arguments and the types of evidence they entail in relation to number of recent investigations into cross-linguistic influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an attempt to elicit examples of spontaneous vocabulary reactivation as a result of a short period of intensive exposure to an L2 environment. The data collected suggests that extensive reactivation may take place under these conditions, but it is largely driven by words that were encountered in the environment. Some spontaneous reactivation occurs as well, but this seems to be on a much smaller scale than is implied in accounts of the ‘Boulogne Ferry Effect’. The paper argues that detailed investigations using co-operative single subjects can sometimes allow us to research questions which are not amenable to experiments using large subject groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a case of grammatical optionality in one type of Japanese passive by English- and Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese. It argues that such optionality arises due to optional selection of related but different lexical items from the interlanguage lexicon. The data were gathered from 81 English-speaking and 85 Chinese-speaking learners whose proficiency levels ranged from intermediate to highly advanced. L1 effects were found in general acquisition patterns for the three types of Japanese passives, the ni direct, the ni yotte, and the ni indirect, consistent with typological similarities and differences in passive types between these languages. Both English- and Chinese-speaking highly advanced learners, however, rated one type of ungrammatical ni indirect passive sentences optionally as grammatical or ungrammatical, while they judged its grammatical counterpart correctly as grammatical. This paper proposes that such optional grammaticality judgments resulted from the process of an elaborated version of "demarking" (Sorace 2000a), which is taken as an instantiation of a general linguistic principle, that of Economy of Representations. Thus, this divergent interlanguage phenomenon is accounted for without positing any deficit in interlanguage grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates free occurring conversational data in French as a second language. Its focus of attention is a debated concept within the conversation analytic approach, i.e., topic management. After an overview of the existing literature on topic management and the conceptualisation of learning and L2 interactional competence, the main part of the article will be concerned with data analysis. The data show an au-pair girl speaking French with her host-family at different points in time. The longitudinal design allows for describing in detail and conceptualising L2 interactional competence and its development. In fact, taking into consideration interactional aspects, such as sequential and action organisation, it contributes to a better understanding of L2 learning. The results show how topic management is not only the object of, but also the means for, learning an L2, whilst being socialised into the very same L2. This article contributes to an ongoing debate in the field of CA and, especially, CA-SLA about conceptualising L2 learning and tracking the development of L2 interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion pertaining to the source of optionality in second language (L2) pronominal interpretation. We examined pronominal use not only in L2 English adverbial - adjunct CP clauses ('The student was upset because he had failed the test'), but also in English VP-coordination structures ('Jane had studied hard and (she) passed the exam'), an area which has never been investigated before. While English adjunct CP clauses represent a context in which overt pronominal subjects are obligatory, in VP-coordination pronouns can be apparently dropped. These structures were tested by means of two English production tasks: a Sentence Completion task and a Cloze Test. Our results showed that compared to the English controls the Greek learners used (a) significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in adjunct CP clauses and, crucially, (b) significantly more overt pronominal subjects in VP-coordination structures. After examining two possible accounts for the observed optionality, namely, the Interface Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis, we argue that a language internal syntax explanation best addresses our data both in the adjunct CP clauses and in the VP-coordination structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the overarching conclusions of three consecutive investigations into task-based L2 performance. It aims at giving a better understanding of how changes in the number of elements referred to in a task affect L2 production, and how this relates to cognitive task complexity. Furthermore, it evaluates differences between monologic and dialogic tasks, and searches for combined effects of the factors ‘± elements’ and ‘± monologic’. Analyses examined the oral task performances of 152 participants by using global measures of linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency as well as a task specific measure. Results revealed hardly any effects of the manipulation of the number of elements. Dialogic tasks, however, consistently guided L2 performers towards greater accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency. The discussion compares these findings to native speaker baseline data, reviews the results in light of Robinson’s (2005) Cognition Hypothesis, and highlights the cognitive impact of the factor ‘± monologic’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis of 100 narrative texts concerned with English and Italian as L1s and L2s. We will compare the way both native speakers and learners build textual cohesion when faced with a narrative task involving several referential restrictions: contrasts of entity and polarity, maintenance of the same predication, temporal shifts etc. The stimulus used to collect the data is the film retelling The Finite Story by Dimroth (2006). Our results will add to the debate about the learners’ tendency to establish anaphoric linkage according to the specific grammaticised (readily encodable) concepts of their mother tongue. In particular, we will show that even at very advanced and almost native levels learners tend to exploit formal and conceptual means resembling those of their mother tongue, demonstrating by that that they have not completely abandoned the L1 specific “perspective taking”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While SLA studies on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation have primarily illuminated the impact of social and socio-biographic factors on such development, this paper is a response to the need for studies of the relationship between sociolinguistic development and other components of the learner’s L2 linguistic repertoire, such as grammatical development, which is the focus of this study. With the aim of exploring the hypothesis that grammatical development is a pre-requisite to sociolinguistic development, the study presents quantitative findings which compare longitudinal development on a number of grammatical and sociolinguistic features in the case of Irish university learners of French. Findings suggest that while grammatical development may be important, it may be not enough, such that it is naturalistic exposure which provides the necessary impetus for such sociolinguistic development. Moreover, the extent of grammatical development in terms of the range of grammatical features which are productively used within the learner’s linguistic repertoire is a further factor which complexifies the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language testing researchers have recently shown interest in diagnostic testing. However, diagnostic testing requires a better understanding of language abilities at a less general level than has been normal in language testing, and this has posed challenges to testers to define their diagnostic constructs both theoretically and operationally. In theory, second language acquisition (SLA) should be able to offer insights into the construct of reading in a second or foreign language (S/FL), and testing ought to be able to base diagnostic tests of S/FL reading on theoretical insights from SLA. It is, however, unclear whether this happens in practice. In this paper we examine the potential synergy between second language acquisition and second and foreign language testing, and we report on progress in three inter-related research projects into S/FL reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a single-subject study of word associations in English. The work uses an innovative research methodology which makes it possible to examine very large numbers of associations. From this we can make some reasonably reliable estimates about the global and local structure of the association network of the Subject. The data suggests that this network is more dense than some common metaphorical descriptions of lexical networks imply. Some of the implications of this for models of L2 vocabulary development are briefly explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the acquisition of interpretable features in English L2 learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The presence of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998; Zagona, 2002); that is, personal a is constrained by the interpretability of semantic features. Forty-nine English L2 learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels, and 16 Spanish controls participated in an Acceptability Judgement task. The results showed that L2 learners of Spanish across three proficiency levels behaved differently from native speakers of Spanish. The L2 learners seem to have attained some of the interpretable features (i.e., [±animate]) of the Spanish a-DP direct objects, but reveal delays with others. Nonetheless, our data illustrate partial convergence by advanced learners with the native speakers: some interpretable features are attainable, while others may be less accessible and subject to developmental processes. In analyzing our data we draw on Lardiere’s (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, but expanded and extended it in an attempt to critically evaluate and broaden it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation has been a major research topic within SLA for over four decades, yet has endured a marginalized position within the field, remaining somewhat isolated from its more mainstream linguistic traditions. The analysis of motivation and its role in SLA has largely been at the level of global learning outcomes, and research has had little to say about how motivational factors relate to the interim processes of linguistic development. Thus while motivation is recognized as a prerequisite for successful SLA, the relevance of motivation research to understanding the finer detail of how SLA happens has been unclear. This paper discusses some studies that have attempted to integrate the analysis of motivation with more linguistic approaches in SLA. It proposes an agenda for bridging the gap between motivation and mainstream SLA research, and suggests how motivation research may contribute to the development of major lines of thinking within the field [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent psycholinguistic studies provide compelling evidence for the claim that both languages are active when second language (L2) learners and bilinguals process information in one language alone. The parallel activation of the two languages occurs even when individuals are performing highly practiced tasks such as reading, listening, and speaking, and even when they are highly proficient in both languages. The presence of cross-language activity in the absence of random errors, particularly for those who are highly proficient in the L2, suggests that a mechanism of cognitive control is in place to guide the selection of the intended language. The focus of current research is to understand the basis of this cognitive mechanism, how it varies as a function of individual differences in cognitive resources, and what consequences it holds for cognition more generally. In this paper we consider whether L2 learners and bilinguals are able to exploit cues to language status that might allow them to focus their attention on languagerelevant attributes of processing or to effectively inhibit information related to the language not in use as a means to control language selection. The results of the present study suggest that it is possible to create a functional language cue for planning the L2 and bias language selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in Italian, by native Italian speakers and near-native Italian speakers whose L1 is Croatian. In a picture-selection task, the two groups of speakers had to identify the antecedents of third person null and overt subject pronouns in ambiguous forward and backward anaphora sentences and their unambiguous counterparts. In all contexts under investigation, near-natives expressed native-like antecedent preferences, indicating that they have acquired not only the syntactic, but also the discourse-pragmatic constraints on the realisation of pronominal subjects in Italian. Given that Croatian and Italian do not differ with respect to the licensing and distribution of pronominal forms, the results provide additional evidence for an account attributing the well-attested tendency of bilingual speakers of a null subject language and a non-null subject language to overuse and misinterpret overt subjects in the null subject language to crosslinguistic influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, L2 learners of English are reported to have problems accepting grammatical unaccusative sentences like the cup broke yesterday although they accept the passivized form like the cup was broken yesterday (e.g. Yip 1995; Ju 2000). They also produce ungrammatical sentences like “If the World War III is happened, . . .”. It has been suggested that these phenomena are universal in the development of L2 English because they occur in the English of L2 learners with different L1s (cf. Ju 2000). In this paper, we present an empirical study investigating whether these non-target phenomena also occur in L2 Chinese. It is found that English speakers of Chinese at different proficiency levels fully accept the NP-V unaccusative construction. Optionality is observed in English speakers’ non-target passivized unaccusative verbs of change of state, which are argued to be due to L1 transfer when English speakers incorrectly treat Chinese change-of-state verbs as causative. Overall, our results suggest that the overpassivization phenomenon should not be considered universal in the L2 acquisition of unaccusativity despite their prevalence in L2 English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of Spanish to the field of SLA continues to grow (Lafford & Salaberry 2003; Montrul 2004), and the need for good L2 Spanish datasets is becoming increasingly evident. In this paper we introduce a newly created database titled Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC), describing the rationale underlying the database design and methodology used for its construction. This project applying CHILDES tools to L2 Spanish follows successful creation of a collection of French L2 oral corpora (Rule et al. 2003), already available at www.flloc.soton.ac.uk. Creating a successful oral corpus is costly and available corpora are often built somewhat opportunistically from available material rather than designed in a balanced way to facilitate SLA research. The SPLLOC database has been designed to fill the existing gap in Spanish L2 resources and also to support a focused research agenda investigating learner development with respect to the verb phrase, clitic pronouns, and word order, from an interface perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an investigation of the extent and nature of cross-linguistic influence on both L2 and L1 phraseological competence of advanced Polish learners of English. We review relevant research studies, which describe various types of collocational deviation from native speaker norms in the language production of advanced learners, and indicate that the collocational choices of learners may be affected by their L1, which results either in incorrect collocations, or in patterns of underuse or overuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent second language (L2) acquisition research has proposed that purely syntactic features are easier to acquire and less vulnerable than ones involving the interfaces (Sorace, 2004; Serratrice et al. 2004). The present paper addresses this issue by investigating the acquisition of the Spanish personal preposition a in English L2 learners of Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the specificity/definiteness of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and verb semantics (Torrego 1998; Zagona 2002). 33 English L2 learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels, and 14 Spanish controls participated in an acceptability judgement task. The results showed significant differences between native speakers and L2 learners of all proficiency levels, who performed at chance, and support the claim that L2 learners have difficulties acquiring structures involving the syntax/semantics interface. However, the advanced learners showed sensitivity to the least complex condition providing evidence that interface phenomena may be acquirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study of the acquisition of reflexive and reciprocal forms in L2 Italian from the point of view of their argument structure. The results are interpreted with respect to the debate about whether transfer is monolithic (Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Whong-Barr 2005) or modular (Montrul 1997), considering at the same time other relevant factors — innate mechanisms and L2 input. On the basis of the acceptability judgements of Serbian and English learners, compared to native speakers of Italian, it is argued that a modular approach is more realistic, as different types of transfer were identified for morphology (direct transfer of L1 marking) and argument structure (indirect influence of L1 general properties). Possible reliance on innate knowledge was detected at the argument structure level, while the input (examined through a corpus study) was found to influence both domains in different ways. It is also suggested that the three factors should be looked at jointly rather than in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of second language acquisition (SLA) forms a young academic discipline, emerging from fundamental paradigm shifts in SLA’s parent disciplines, linguistics and psychology. This paper gives a brief overview of how the study of SLA came into existence, formulates the fundamental questions concerning SLA, reviews some recent developments, and identifies possibilities and challenges for SLA theory construction and empirical research in the near future. To tackle the fundamental issues of SLA successfully, it is mandatory that SLA researchers, of whom the majority currently has a linguistic background, collaborate with researchers in psychology and other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior applications of the lexical decision task in second language research have either examined performance accuracy (Meara and Buxton 1987) or speed of response to familiar items (Segalowitz and Segalowitz 1993). This paper examines how well the two measures together serve to discriminate among between-group levels of proficiency and within-group levels of difficulty on an English lexical decision task. Performance was compared across three levels of English proficiency (Intermediate L2, Advanced L2 and English L1 control) and four levels of item difficulty, as defined by frequency of occurrence (words from the 2000, 3000, 5000 and 10,000 most frequently occurring words). Accuracy and reaction time measures systematically decreased as a function of increasing proficiency and frequency level. Response variability, as measured by the coefficient of variance, also decreased as performance improved. The implications of the findings for the use of lexical decision tasks in second language research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss our socio-educational model of second language acquisition and demonstrate how it provides a fundamental research paradigm to investigate the role of attitudes and motivation in learning another language. This is a general theoretical model designed explicitly for the language learning situation, and is applicable to both foreign and second language learning contexts. It has three important features. First, it satisfies the scientific requirement of parsimony in that it involves a limited number of operationally defined constructs. Second, it has associated with it the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) that yields reliable assessments of its major constructs, permitting empirical tests of the model. Third, it is concerned with the motivation to learn and become fluent in another language, and not simply with task and/or classroom motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent proposals argue that interface areas such as syntax/semantics and syntax/pragmatics are particularly difficult for adult learners, in comparison to purely syntactic phenomena (Sorace 2003, 2004). In contrast, other research shows that L2 learners are able to acquire target representations even when the interpretation is not readily available in the input (Borgonovo, Bruhn de Garavito and Prévost 2005, Dekydtspotter and Sprouse 2001). In this paper we add to the growing literature on the acquisition of interpretational properties by showing that adult L2 learners can acquire knowledge of the syntactic correlates of the semantic notion of specificity in constructions involving topicalisation and null objects in Spanish. The learners’ first language (L1) is Brazilian Portuguese, where specificity does not play the role in these constructions that it plays in Spanish. Results show that learners can go beyond their L1 with respect to the acquisition of interface phenomena, suggesting that native-like grammars are attainable in L2 acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children often express possession before they have mastered the linguistic means to express this notion in adult forms. In this paper we present evidence on the acquisition of possessive constructions in bilingual children acquiring a Germanic and a Romance language (i.e. Dutch/French and Dutch/Italian). In a multiple case study, we compare their acquisition with that of monolingual children and suggest that while the stages of acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children are largely the same, the possessive constructions of the bilingual children show signs of cross-linguistic influence. This influence goes mainly from Dutch (the dominant language) to the Romance language, but there are also signs of influence from the Romance language on Dutch. This is in contradiction to earlier claims (Hulk and Mueller 2000, 2001, for example), where influence is predicted to be unidirectional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) (Andersen 1986, 1991) suggests an eight-stage development of the Spanish tense–aspect system by English learners in which tenses progressively mark verb categories. The current paper, which presents some of the main findings from Labeau (2005), explores the relevance of the AH to an acquisitional setting other than that for which it was developed. Specifically, it tests the four tenets of the AH, as described by Shirai and Kurono (1998) against data from the acquisition of the French tense/aspect system by advanced learners of French in a tutored environment. It compares the use of French verbal morphology by advanced Anglophone learners with a control group of native speakers engaging in a variety of tasks: (1) oral and written narratives (2) a grammar cloze-test and (3) a written editing task. Having shown that the basic hypothesis is unable to account for the development of advanced French, the study tests an expanded version of the AH (Andersen 2002) and suggests further factors to take into account in the description of advanced stages of tense–aspect acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study in which two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared. The two models are Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001a, 2001b) and Skehan and Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan 1998, Skehan and Foster 2001). Sixty-two Dutch university students of Italian performed two writing tasks with prompts of differing cognitive complexity. Linguistic performance was operationalized in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical variation and accuracy. The study provides partial support for the Cognition Hypothesis, in so far as the written products of the cognitively more demandings task turned out to be more accurate, with significantly lower error ratios per T-unit than those of the cognitively less demanding task. In addition stronger effects of cognitive task complexity were found for high-proficiency learners than for low-proficiency learners. No effects could be observed on measures of syntactic complexity or lexical variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realization by applied linguists that second language learners cannot achieve high levels of grammatical competence from entirely meaning centered instruction has led them to propose that learners need to focus on form, i.e. to attend to linguistic elements during a communicative activity (Long 1991, De Keyser 1998, Norris and Ortega 2000, Ellis 2001). However, most advocates of Focus on Form (FonF), have also proscribed Focus on Forms (FonFs), the systematic teaching of isolated grammatical items and rules. So far, FonF research has been concerned with grammatical, not lexical, instruction. In this paper, which was originally presented as a plenary session at the 2004 EUROSLA conference, I examine the need for Focus on Form and the proscription of Focus on Forms from the vocabulary learning perspective. First, I argue that, similarly to grammar, comprehensible input is insufficient for acquiring vocabulary, and consequently Focus on Form is an essential component of instruction. I base my argument on the fallacy of the assumptions which underlie the vocabulary-through-input hypothesis: the noticing assumption, the guessing ability assumption, the guessing-retention link assumption and the cumulative gain assumption. Second, I defend Focus on Forms and argue against the claim that attention to form must be motivated by and carried out within a communicative task environment. The defense is based on the nature of lexical competence, which is perceived as a combination of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary use, speed of lexical access and strategic competence. The two arguments above will be supported by empirical evidence from three types of vocabulary learning studies: (a) the ‘classic’ task embedded FonF, (b) task related FonFs, and (c) ‘pure’ FonFs studies, unrelated to any task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of the development of L2 pragmatic competence in the speech act of criticisms. Data were collected from three proficiency groups of Vietnamese foreign language learners of English via a conversation elicitation task and a written questionnaire. An interview was also conducted to probe into the learners’ pragmatic decision-making. Results show that the strongest difference among the learners lay in the area of modifiers to criticisms, rather than in the criticism strategies per se. Specifically, as the learners became more proficient in the L2, they mitigated their criticisms more often, thanks to a better control over language processing. However, they still lagged far behind the native speaker group in the frequency of their use of mitigators. These proficiency effects were explained by the EFL context, which probably did not much facilitate pragmatic development, given the learners’ insufficient exposure to the target norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how going to gains a foothold as an expression of future time reference in a longitudinal study of 16 learners of English as a second language. Typically dominated by will, the grammatical expression of future time reference illustrates the one-to-one principle. The emergence of going to signals the beginning of multifunctionality in future time reference. Emergent uses of going to become successfully integrated into the interlanguage when going to shows a strong association with a single, identifiable meaning. Such early uses generalize into additional meanings. Early form-meaning associations tend to be intention-based, while later uses expand to include prediction-based future time references. Some learners also appear to abandon the use of going to when no clear form-meaning association is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the nature of root infinitives (RIs) produced by adult L2 learners in a corpus of L2 French data from 21 English-speaking adults at the beginner and intermediate levels. Although the production of RIs varies across learners, the results show that infinitival verbs appear in contexts requiring the projection of functional categories (e.g. with clitic subjects and in CPs). Moreover, most RIs have a declarative reading, only a few have a modal interpretation. This suggests that adult learners have knowledge of finiteness features and that they may experience problems supplying the exact inflectional morphology (see Lardiere 2000), regardless of the clause-type in which the verb appears. This also corroborates findings from longitudinal studies (Prévost 2003a) and contrasts with L2 French data from anglophone children (Prévost & White 2000a). Finally, the beginners produce finite verbs in nonfinite positions, which is not reported in child L2 French. It is argued that this is due to the lack of overt infinitival morphology in the L1, rather than to impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many L2 speakers fail to supply functional morphology consistently in production. In this paper, the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) is proposed, where this is attributed to L1 constraints on prosodic structure. The PTH maintains that functional material which is appropriately represented in syntax may be deleted in production if prosodic structures necessary in the L2 cannot be built from L1 structures. When non-target-like L1 structures are used to accommodate L2 functional material, use is variable and there are asymmetries in the contexts where it appears. The present focus is on an end-state Turkish-speaking learner of English. It is shown that the prosodic structures available in Turkish can be minimally adapted to yield the structure required for English inflection, where the speaker is highly accurate. To represent English articles, the required structure cannot be built from L1 structures; hence, rate of suppliance is lower and is largely determined by phonological context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of the written production of six groups of learners (N = 520) in a formal instruction setting and to investigate the effects of onset and age on the levels of attainment in writing performance. The written production was measured after 200, 416 and 726 hours of instruction. Both intragroup and intergroup analyses were carried out (a) to analyse the long-term effects of an earlier start in second language writing in a school setting, (b) to analyse the patterns of development between the four writing component measures depending on learners’ age, and (c) to test whether the relationships found between the measures in the four areas of writing differ depending on learners’ age group. This study concludes that (a) at the end of the instructional period Early Starters still have not surpassed Late Starters, (b) there seem to be two patterns of writing performance depending on learners’ age, and (c) the correlations found between the writing component indicators change depending on learners’ age group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published within the issue including one by Fabiana Rosi that takes an original approach to the investigation of aspect in the second language (L2), one by Anna Nilsson that investigates the lexical processing by Swedish (L3) learners of French, and one by Agnieszka Skrzypek that looks at the role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) in L2 collocational development by Polish L2 learners of English.

In the article, author offers information on the EuroSLA conferences held in Aix-en-Provence of France in August 2015, which is organized by the committee members including Isabel Alvarado, Carine André, and Sébastien Bermond. He acknowledges the contribution of members of the scientific committee and institutions and those who submitted papers for the yearbook including Jean-Marc Dewaele, Christine Dimroth, and Tess Fitzpatrick.