Volume 54, Issue 3 -

This article seeks to account for asymmetrical interpretations in early L3 French Determiner Phrase (DP) and Adjectival Placement in relation to two hypotheses. The two theories in question are the Typological Primacy Model of Rothman (2011. L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinancy: the typological primacy model. Second Language Research 27: 107–127) and the Interpretability Hypothesis of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007. The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23: 215–242). Using an elicited production experiment and a grammaticality judgment task, it is argued that the asymmetrical definite-indefinite article interpretation in L3 French cannot be explained following the Typological Primacy Model, which stipulates that the perceived similarity between the acquired L2 English and the target L3 French gives rise to transfer in early L3 development. The article proposes, following Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007. The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23: 215–242), that the observed L3 behaviour results from an inaccessibility of article-associated syntactic features which are subject to critical period. The L3 interlanguage grammars involve the use of alternative resources made available by UG instead.

Discourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner’s native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle doch by speakers of Dutch and speakers with a native language other than Dutch. Like German, Dutch has a rich inventory of discourse particles and one of them can be considered the cognate of doch: toch . We performed our investigation by means of an online cloze test among 85 Dutch students of German and 76 learners of German with a first language other than Dutch. We tested five different functions of doch , some of which overlapped with the functions of Dutch toch and some which did not. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to have similar particles in one’s mother tongue but we did not find evidence that it is extra beneficial to have form-meaning equivalents between the L1 and L2.

This paper investigates advanced German learners’ use of the progressive in spoken English by analyzing the German error-tagged subcorpus of LINDSEI-GE compared to the native speaker counterpart LOCNEC. The analysis reveals a significant underuse of the progressive in the spoken language. Our qualitative error analysis shows that the error patterns do not explain the frequency patterns at all, as there is only a very low proportion of errors caused by a non-use of the progressive in contexts where it would be required. The most frequent type of error is a misuse of the progressive in non-required contexts. Finally, we find that there is great variability in the performances of the individual learners, also as regards the number and types of errors committed.

The present study set out to examine how we can optimize paired-associate learning of second language (L2) vocabulary. In paired-associate learning, retrieval, where learners are required to access information about an L2 word from memory, is found to increase vocabulary learning. Retrieval can be categorized according to dichotomies of (a) recognition versus recall and (b) receptive versus productive. In order to identify the optimal retrieval format, the present study compared the effects of the following four conditions: recognition, recall, hybrid (combination of recall and recognition), and productive recall only. In this study, 64 English-speaking college students studied 60 Swahili-English word pairs using computer-based flashcard software. Results suggested that for paired-associate learning of L2 vocabulary, (a) recall formats are more effective than recognition for the acquisition of productive knowledge of orthography and (b) recognition formats are more desirable than recall when knowledge of spelling is not required.