My first Announcement as General Editor is devoted to a heartfelt farewell to Nick C. Ellis, whose last year as General Editor was 2020. His decision to turn to other endeavors in life was made prior to the global pandemic that has upended our lives. However, his official last event as General Editor took place on the heel of the COVID‐19 outbreak, in a 5‐hour virtual Board Annual Meeting marathon

Since the early 2000s, neurocognitive research on second language (L2) acquisition has been controversial as to how plastic the human brain is after puberty. Recent studies have extended this debate to first language loss (L1 attrition). This article gives an overview of the first event‐related brain potential (ERP) studies on L1 attrition and L2 learning and discusses their implications for our understanding

Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single‐language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed‐language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and familiar objects in two conditions: identical (both

Novel word learning and consolidation was studied in inexperienced language learners, to conceptually replicate and extend a similar study in experienced learners by Bakker, Takashima, Van Hell, Janzen, and McQueen (2015). Participants learned definitions for novel words on Day 1 and for another set of novel words on Day 2. Brain potentials collected in a semantic relatedness task revealed that learned

Over the past decades, research employing artificial grammar, sequence learning, and statistical learning paradigms has flourished, not least because these methods appear to offer a window, albeit with a restricted view, on implicit learning processes underlying natural language learning. But these paradigms usually provide relatively little exposure, use meaningless stimuli, and do not even necessarily

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule‐like competence accounts to more skill‐like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their languages should depend on how much they practice each (not

Several studies found cross‐linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial language versions in a between‐subjects design. Priming

Internal error monitoring as reflected by the error‐related negativity (ERN) component can give insight into the process of learning a second language (L2). Yet, early stages of learning are characterized by high levels of uncertainty, which obscures the process of error detection. We examine how uncertainty about L2 syntactic representations, induced by different levels of language conflict, is reflected

Besides acquiring one's first language(s) in infancy, learning an additional language at a later point in life is one of the most fascinating accomplishments of the human mind. It is so fascinating that it verges on the miraculous. Scientists are not usually fond of the term, however, and many a scholar has striven to identify, characterize, and quantify, if not resolve, the cognitive and neural mechanisms

Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and case markers following syntactic rules. We also measured individual differences

This study examined the monitoring abilities of trilinguals in reading comprehension, addressing the following questions: Is comprehension monitoring related to reading comprehension across first, second, and third languages? Is comprehension monitoring shared across the languages of trilingual adults (domain‐general) or rather linked to language proficiency (language‐specific)? Eighty undergraduates

In this study, we investigated the learning of indexical features by English‐speaking adults using a novel experimental paradigm. In a conceptual replication of Rácz, Hay, and Pierrehumbert (2017), participants learned an allomorphy pattern cued by a given social context. The social contexts were represented by conversation partners who differed by age, ethnicity, and/or gender and were positioned

To date, linguistic alignment studies in second language acquisition have mainly been conducted during face‐to‐face (FTF) interactions. In the current study, we examined and compared the effect of structural alignment on the development of English direct and indirect questions in FTF and synchronous computer‐mediated communication (SCMC) contexts. Additionally, we assessed participants’ working memory

Obtaining quick and reliable evidence regarding the proficiency of learners is a perennial issue in second language (L2) learning research. In this study, we examined naturalistic utterance recall as a measure of L2 learning proficiency that can be easily extracted from videos and automatically scored using the video's captions. In our recall task, learners listen to audio clips and write down as much

Answering calls to map college‐level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower‐division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of their programs), using the Oral Proficiency Interview–computer

Recent studies have uncovered substantial individual differences in first language (L1) language attainment across the lifespan and across multiple components of language. The existence of such variability raises the question of its role in second language (L2) learning. The existing body of research on L1–L2 relationships has primarily targeted reading comprehension by means of controlled experimental

This study explored the initial stages of adult second language (L2) learning with a special focus on the acquisition of the target language sound system. The aim was to analyze the longitudinal development of Spanish stop voicing contrasts in an immersion learning context. Native English‐speaking late learners of Spanish provided production data for Spanish stops on a weekly basis throughout a domestic

Some second language (L2) acquisition researchers have suggested that learners should be made aware of cross‐linguistic similarity for them to benefit from cognateness. To test this assumption, we ran two longitudinal classroom quasi‐experiments with Polish learners of English. We chose 30 Polish‐English cognates, 30 false cognates, and 30 non‐cognates matched on L2 frequency and concreteness and embedded

Building on initiatives to promote high quality methodologies and Open Science practices in the language sciences, Language Learning will introduce, as of March 2020, a new manuscript type entitled Methods Showcase Articles (MSAs). The purpose of MSAs is to introduce new or emerging qualitative and quantitative methods, techniques, or instrumentation for language data collection, cleaning, sampling

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24–32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop approximately at age 3, namely, response inhibition and interference

The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co‐occurrences of multiple words) is related to first language (L1) raters’ intuitive judgments of second language (L2) speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by 85 Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were transcribed for 10 L1 raters to access for global comprehensibility

This study examined the relationship between oral fluency and use of multiword sequences (MWSs) across four proficiency levels (Low B1 to C1 of the Common European Framework of Reference). Data came from 56 learners taking the speaking test of the Test of English for Educational Purposes, and our analysis obtained different measures of fluency (speed, breakdown, repair) and MWSs (frequency, proportion

In the present study, we sought to advance the field of learner corpus research by tracking the development of phrasal vocabulary in essays produced at two different points in time. To this aim, we employed a large pool of second language (L2) learners (N = 175) from three proficiency levels—beginner, elementary, and intermediate—and focused on an underrepresented L2 (Italian). Employing mixed‐effects

Recent years have seen an expansion in the research related to structural brain adaptations related to the acquisition and processing of additional languages. However, the accumulating evidence remains to a great extent inconsistent, with a large variety of cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar effects reported in various studies. Here we propose that the variability in the data can be explained by

Adequately responding to linguistic diversity in the classroom is imperative in European school contexts, not least because of current migratory movements. This article presents the results of an intervention study with primary school English‐foreign‐language learners in Germany (N = 42, Mage = 8.70 years) from linguistically diverse backgrounds, who participated in a learning unit on the human body