Volume 45, Issue 4

It has been argued that extended exposure to naturalistic input provides L2 learners with more of an opportunity to converge of target morphosyntactic competence as compared to classroom-only environments, given that the former provide more positive evidence of less salient linguistic properties than the latter (e.g., Isabelli 2004). Implicitly, the claim is that such exposure is needed to fully reset parameters. However, such a position conflicts with the notion of parameterization (cf. Rothman and Iverson 2007). In light of two types of competing generative theories of adult L2 acquisition – the No Impairment Hypothesis (e.g., Duffield and White 1999) and so-called Failed Features approaches (e.g., Beck 1998; Franceschina 2001; Hawkins and Chan 1997), we investigate the verifiability of such a claim. Thirty intermediate L2 Spanish learners were tested in regards to properties of the Null-Subject Parameter before and after study-abroad. The data suggest that (i) parameter resetting is possible and (ii) exposure to naturalistic input is not privileged.

One of the major findings in previous research on reflexive coreference in a second language is that learners of English violate the locality requirement of the reflexive form x-self more readily when it appears in the subordinate infinitival clause than when included in the subordinate tensed clause (a phenomenon called the “tensed-infinitive asymmetry”). This paper argues that the cause of this asymmetry is the difference in the factivity of the event/situation to be configured into a particular construction, rather than the difference in the syntactic type of the sentence per se . In an experiment that was designed to test the validity of this postulation, the learners tended to respond differently to the different degrees of factivity presumed in individual sentences, in line with the prediction. Thus, it seems that the learners based their interpretation on the semantics of the sentence. The theoretical as well as pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.

This study analyzed the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p, t, k/ in Japanese and English by English-speaking children (n = 15 ) in a Japanese immersion program. The immersion children produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children and the immersion teachers, but they produced them with significantly shorter VOT values than their English VOT. This suggests that the immersion students are making a phonetic distinction in VOT between Japanese and English, though their VOT values are still intermediate, compared with the norms of the monolingual speakers and their immersion teachers. In other words, the immersion children implemented the VOT contrast differently from the model they were exposed to, that is, that of the Japanese English bilingual teachers.

IRAL would like to recognize and thank the following external reviewers who contributed to this volume.