The study explores the psycholinguistic processes underlying L2 self-repair behavior by means of analyzing the timing of various types of self-corrections found in the speech of 30 Hungarian speakers of English at three levels of proficiency (pre-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced). The paper discusses the relevance of timing data for the existing models of speech monitoring and examines how the level of proficiency of L2 learners affects the speed of error detection and the execution of correction. The results obtained indicate that the perceptual loop theory and the activation spreading theory of monitoring both rightly assume that monitoring involves the same mechanisms as speech comprehension. The analysis of the timing data reveals that corrections of pragmatically inappropriate lexical choice have detection times very similar to those of lexical errors. This may be regarded as indirect evidence for the claim that lexical entries in the mental lexicon also contain specifications concerning their pragmatic value. The results show that the level of proficiency of the participants affects the time necessary for the lexical, grammatical, and phonological encoding of the repair, which is caused by the difference in the degree of automaticity of these mechanisms at various stages of L2 development.

This study considers the role of instruction, second language (L2) input, first language (L1) transfer, and Universal Grammar (UG) in the development of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. Specifically, it investigates the acquisition of the Spanish morpheme se by English-speaking adult learners. Participants included 91 university students and 30 Spanish native-speaker controls. Learners received form-focused, communicative instruction on se for one week and were tested before, immediately following, and 24 days after the treatment period. Assessment consisted of a grammaticality judgment task and two production tasks using se in a variety of verb classes. The results showed that se had been added to many learners' grammars, but also that L1-derived forms and overgeneralization errors had not been completely preempted. These findings are taken as evidence that the development of L2 grammars is affected by a number of independent, yet cooperating, knowledge sources, which thus supports a modular account of L2 acquisition.

Felix (1988) claimed to demonstrate that UG-based knowledge of grammaticality causes nonnative speakers (NNSs) to have more accurate grammaticality judgments on sentences that are ungrammatical according to UG than on those that are grammatical. Birdsong (1994) criticized the methodology employed, noting that it ignores “response bias” (a propensity to judge sentences as ungrammatical) as a potential explanation. Felix and Zobl (1994) dismissed this criticism as merely methodological. In this paper, Birdsong's criticism is upheld by considering a statistical model of the data. At the same time, a more complete logistic regression model allows a fuller statistical analysis, revealing tentative support for the asymmetry claim, as well as differential learning states for different constructions and a tendency toward transfer avoidance. These theoretically significant effects were unnoticed in the earlier discussion of this research. For SLA research on grammaticality judgments to proceed fruitfully, appropriate statistical models need to be considered in designing the research.

This experimental study on English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages investigates the interaction of universal principles and L1 knowledge in interlanguage grammars by focusing on verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation (such as break in English). These verbs have the same lexico-semantic composition, but differ crosslinguistically as to how they encode the alternation morphologically. Results of a picture judgment task show that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners of Turkish, Spanish, and English with different L1s rely on a universal mechanism when learning transitivity alternations. L1 influence plays a prominent role in the morphological realization of the alternation. These findings suggest that UG and L1 knowledge may not affect all linguistic domains in the same way at a given stage of development. It is proposed that transfer is subject to modularity in interlanguage grammars.

Most of the contents of this book were published separately but have been substantially revised and updated for this volume. Although the book is primarily intended for language teachers and researchers, the publisher recommends it also to undergraduate and postgraduate students. For that purpose, attractive and probably effective discussion questions and activities have been added to each chapter.

Rod Ellis's latest offering addresses issues relating to the interface between SLA research and language pedagogy. To this end, the book opens with an informative and thought-provoking examination of applied SLA (research simultaneously encompassing the theory and practice of SLA and pedagogy), which, following Widdowson, Ellis distinguishes from SLA applied (extension of SLA findings to teaching). In this regard he discusses the difference between technical knowledge and “confirmatory,” often experimental, research on the one hand, and practical knowledge and “interpretative,” real world, observation-interactional research on the other. According to Ellis, the confirmatory tradition, which promotes an applied science (i.e., SLA applied) view of education, has been the dominant paradigm in the field. This tradition situates researchers at the top of the research-practice hierarchy as producers of information and locates teachers lower down on the hierarchy as information consumers.

During the past decade, John Schumann and his colleagues at UCLA have been pursuing a novel line of research by examining SLA from a neurobiological perspective. Several articles have reported on various phases of this extended program and now The neurobiology of affect in language offers a comprehensive summary of Schumann's theory. As suggested by the title, affect in this book is seen as central to the understanding of SLA. This is because, as the author argues, SLA is emotionally driven and emotion underlies most, if not all, cognition.

This recent volume in the Benjamins series Language Acquisition & Language Disorders is likely to find a wide, international readership among participants in courses on SLA theory as well as among seasoned scholars in the field. As the volume underscores, phonology per se has not been given the extensive attention in second language research and teaching that syntax has experienced, and, for its title alone, the book would be a welcome addition to the literature.

This collection of ten articles constitutes the fourth volume of a series, Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities. The book's title refers to an aspect of variation in sign languages (pinky extension) and an aspect of sign language discourse (eye gaze) and underscores the richness and uniqueness of language use in Deaf communities around the world. The ten articles are distributed among the book's six sections: variation, languages in contact, language in education, discourse analysis, second language learning, and language attitudes., Although most of the articles focus on American Sign Language (ASL), one article explores grammatical constraints on fingerspelled English verb loans in British Sign Language, another examines the representation of character signs in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) resulting from contact between TSL and written Chinese, and a third outlines historical, political, and educational issues affecting Irish Sign Language and the Irish Deaf community. The book's coverage of diverse sign language communities is enhanced by an article exploring variation in the use of “tactile ASL” by Deaf-Blind people, in which case a language ordinarily processed in a visual modality is communicated through touch.

As a result of large-scale migrations from the less developed to the more developed countries, the multilingual, multicultural school is becoming a reality, not only in cities with traditionally large immigrant populations such as New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, but throughout North America and Western Europe. Indeed, the 1990 U.S. Census shows that one in every seven children between the ages of 5 and 17 comes from a home where a language other than English is spoken. These major demographic changes have left many teachers and other school personnel unprepared to deal with the new realities of the multilingual, multicultural classroom. Edwards' brief volume is directed to mainstream classroom teachers who, if current trends continue as expected, will spend much of their careers in even more linguistically and culturally diverse schools than exist currently. Edwards' intent is to counter widespread myths about second language learning and bilingualism, and to assist teachers maximizing the rich educational resource that the multicultural, multilingual school represents.

Simultaneously theoretical and data-rich, this volume explores ways in which ethnic minorities grapple with conflicts related to the literacy practices of their home culture as well as those practices demanded by the dominant culture. Truly multicultural in nature, the book offers in-depth glimpses into a variety of teaching and learning contexts: how young Gujarati teenagers in England learn Gujarati (chapter 3), how Hmong parents wish their children to retain fluency in Khmer while also insisting that they attend “English only” schools (chapter 4), how Finns in Sweden and Karelias in Russia grapple with the literacy demands of the majority culture (chapter 1), how “usefulness” becomes the most crucial variable in determining the language of schooling in bi- and multilingual contexts (chapter 2), and how Vietnamese people wrestle with learning their mother tongue in Norway (chapter 8).

This volume consists of a collection of 13 papers from the 23rd International L.A.U.D. conference on “The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages” held at the University of Duisburg, Germany, in March, 1997. The conference was concerned with two different aspects of cross-cultural communication: business communication and the cultural dimension of foreign language teaching. The papers dealing with this second aspect are collected in the present volume.

The phenomenon of styleswitching has been important in the study of L1 and L2 language use. Labov's early studies correlated formal style with attention paid to speech, a notion echoed in Krashen's monitor model. Giles' accommodation theory and Bell's audience design theory claim that speakers styleswitch in order to accommodate to the speech of their audience. Several SLA scholars have found evidence for accommodation in L2 speech as well. Such correlational studies have been criticized for lacking a clear foundation in cognitive theory. In this volume Myers-Scotton describes her Markedness Model (MM), which grounds styleswitching (including codeswitching) in the cognitive theory of somatic markers (Damasio, 1994). Because speech styles are distinguished mainly by the frequency at which certain features (such as dropping a consonant from a cluster) appear, variationists have sought to identify a cognitive mechanism that could account for the apparent fine-tuning of feature frequencies. However, it is not clear from the discussion in this volume whether the somatic marker hypothesis provides such a mechanism.

The goal of this volume is to provide a rich, interdisciplinary foundation of empirical studies describing the discourse of Language Proficiency Interviews (LPIs), focusing on “interactional competence.” The studies not only show how difficult it is to validly assess oral proficiency; they also show that discourse analysis of LPIs—as the editors point out—is very much in its infancy. Most of these studies face research design challenges (e.g., small sample size, sample comparability, coding reliability, or a combination of these), yet they illustrate the potential contributions of various (mostly qualitative) discourse analytic approaches to an understanding and assessment of oral proficiency.

According to the editors of this volume, models and theories of linguistic analysis that are based on a study of monolingual societies are no longer appropriate for our contemporary world. Fueled by an interest in examining “multilingual and pluricultural societies where learning more than one language and accommodating multiple identities is a way of life” (p. 17), they have collected 11 papers as well as an introductory essay that analyze second language learning in a range of interesting multicultural settings. For example, there are papers on the acquisition of Hindi by Tamils in Delhi, English and German by Indian undergraduates at the University of Delhi, and English by immigrants from six different countries in Britain.

From time to time, the annual Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) publishes its papers. Kunnan, his contributors, and Erlbaum are to be commended for a rich, well edited, and thematically unified offering. Some wise decisions were made: author-provided abstracts, references following each paper, author-provided annotated bibliographies, and a rich index. This is more than a collection of conference papers. It is a book in its own right with the potential to become a textbook on language test validation.

In his introduction, Campbell makes a case for the broader relevance of historical linguistics by noting that observing what does and does not change in language contributes to “the understanding of universal grammar, language typology, and human cognition in general” (p. 2). The generativist perspective that phonological and syntactic changes are linked to language acquisition, cited on page 236, illustrates one interface between historical linguistics and general linguistic theory.

As indicated by the title of this volume, this collection of public speeches, conference presentations, and practical tips for the elementary foreign language classroom truly celebrates the vibrancy and mission exhibited by many teachers of foreign languages at the elementary level. The designation FLES* (pronounced “flestar”) has been created by Lipton as an “overall term for all types of elementary school foreign language programs” (p. 1), including sequential FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary School), FLEX (Foreign Language Exploratory), and Immersion. According to Lipton, the term “sequential FLES” subsumes the model usually referred to as FLES.

Tense and aspect is grounded in Gustave Guillaume's notion of “chronogenesis,” the staged development of a complex time image. Within this framework, the historical development of the tense and aspect systems of all branches of Indo-European is analyzed with clarity, demonstrating their divergence from a common model. The approach is based on the notions of Descending (moving-world) versus Ascending (moving-ego) Time, with ω-moments as memory and α-moments as imagination. The position of consciousness in relation to these moments is essential for characterizing aspect.