Second Language Research

This study compared the effects of writing new words in sentences with word picture repetition learning alone. Second language (L2) Spanish learners attempted to learn 24 new Spanish words in one of two conditions while viewing word picture pairs. In Experiment 1, in the no sentence writing condition, the participants viewed 4 repetitions of each word for 6 seconds each. In the sentence writing condition, they viewed 1 repetition of each word for 48 seconds and were asked to write the word in a Spanish sentence. In Experiment 2, the participants were shown one repetition of each word for 24 seconds in both the sentence writing and no sentence writing conditions. Immediate and delayed posttests on productive vocabulary knowledge were administered in both experiments. Scores were submitted to analyses of variance. Condition and time were independent variables. Target word production was scored based on syllables and whole words produced. Results of both experiments indicated strong negative effects for the sentence writing conditions, suggesting that sentence writing can inhibit word form learning during the initial stages of L2 lexical acquisition.

This article examines the emergence of finiteness in early second language (L2) English of five consecutive bilinguals (ages 6 to 9). The departure point is Gavruseva’s (2002; 2003) proposal that nonfinite root predicates result from the underspecification of syntactic aspectual heads at the initial state S₀. Gavruseva’s ‘underspecification of AspP’ account is developed further by examining the feature contents of aspectual projections in English from a crosslinguistic perspective. It is argued that English, in contrast to Russian and French, lacks the genuine imperfective and perfective morphemes and so makes use of a greater variety of aspectual features (e.g., intrinsic and compositional telicity features, inter alia). It is also proposed that an English verb’s telicity semantics defines its aspectual class and predicts its finiteness status in children’s early grammar. An advantage of the ‘aspectual features account’ is that it explains why statives (inherent atelics) and punctual eventives (inherent telics) show much higher finiteness rates than nonpunctual eventives (an aspectual class defined by a compositional telicity feature) in the child L2 data. Other approaches to the root infinitive phenomenon such as the Truncation Hypothesis (Rizzi 1993=94) and the Morphological Deficit Hypothesis (Haznedar and Schwartz, 1997; Lardiere, 1998; Prévost and White, 2000) cannot explain these finiteness patterns.

The purpose of this review article is to survey and evaluate existing books on quantitative/statistical research in applied linguistics. The article begins by explaining the types of texts that will not be reviewed, then it briefly describes nine books that address how to do quantitative/statistical applied linguistics research. The review then compares (in prose and tables) the general characteristics of these nine books, and their coverage of conceptual and statistical topics. Examining all nine books together provides answers to three questions: What is the range of conceptual/statistical topics in applied linguistics? What are the most important conceptual/statistical topics in applied linguistics? And, how has the coverage of topics changed over the years? This review article should help readers sort through current books on how to do quantitative/statistical research so that they can locate one or more texts that will best meet their needs.