This study investigated the phonetic training performance of 80 first language (L1) Catalan/Spanish advanced second language (L2) English learners in a four-session high-variability phonetic training (HVPT) program and how their training progress interacted with stimuli type (nonwords vs. words) and individual differences in auditory selective attention (ASA). Training included discrimination, identification, and immediate repetition tasks targetting the English vowel contrast /ae/-/Lambda/. L2 vowel perception (accuracy and reaction times) and production (Mahalanobis distances between learners' productions of /ae/ and /Lambda/) were measured trial-by-trial and across sessions. Results showed a significant performance improvement in discrimination, identification, and repetition irrespective of stimuli type, although learners trained on words generally achieved higher accuracy. ASA predicted performance in both modalities: Stronger attention skills facilitated perceptual accuracy and processing speed and more distinct vowel production in minimal-pair words. Overall, the findings suggest that stimuli type and learners' attention skills may jointly affect cognitive demands in HVPT and should inform adaptive phonetic training designs.
Input variability (i.e., varied experience with different grammar exemplars; "[talk/think/rant/wonder] about [god/bicycles/dogs]") can improve generalization (i.e., "[Verb] about [Noun]") and enhance learning. Controlled experiments show that input variability benefits children's generalization and extension of linguistic information from input structures to novel contexts (Wonnacott et al., 2012). Such findings drove our investigation into extending input variability benefits to classrooms.Following a usage-based constructionist approach, we present a two-week quasi-experimental teaching intervention with two British Year 2 classes learning German (6-to-7-year-olds; 20 students per class). The intervention featured a variability and no-variability condition, using 16 German "approach" event verb-argument constructions ("To the X [verb] the Y"), featuring four separate or just one verb in the verb slot, respectively. Posttests indicated that children exposed to variability generalized better to novel verbs. The findings corroborate controlled experiments. Even in "noisy" classrooms, input variability can benefit students' construction generalization and extension to novel verbs.
Abstract We investigated priming of Dutch prepositional phrase (PP)‐final and ‐medial passives in a within‐Dutch structural priming experiment in French–Dutch bilinguals. Unlike Dutch, French allows only the PP‐final passive. We asked whether L2 learners can be primed to produce structures that are dissimilar to their L1 (i.e., PP‐medial passive) and whether this depends on L2 proficiency. We observed an unexpected production preference for the PP‐medial passive, which we traced to explicit classroom instruction form preferences. This instructional history, interacting with learners' age of L2 acquisition and evolving implicit expectations about the two passive variants, shaped both production biases and priming effects: Lower proficiency learners mostly produced PP‐medial passives and showed strong PP‐final priming, whereas higher proficiency learners produced both forms, creating room for PP‐medial priming. We conclude that proficiency effects in L2 structural priming likely reflect the interplay between acquisition history, instruction, and implicit expectation adaptation rather than proficiency alone.
There has been an increasing interest in better understanding the role of embodied resources in second language (L2) assessment contexts and thus expanding the construct of interactional competence (IC). However, multimodal analysis has yet to break new grounds in video-mediated interactions in digital assessment environments. This study investigates gaze in video-mediated L2 English paired role-play assessment interactions collected from 117 randomly paired test takers (Common European Framework of Reference, CEFR levels A2-B1), focusing on how test takers manage gaze behavior when encountering trouble in producing turns (e.g., word-searches). Using multimodal conversation analysis, we show (a) that test takers avert their gaze from the screen (and hence from the coparticipant) in the course of trouble and revert gaze toward screen/coparticipant at trouble resolution; and (b) that these gaze behaviors differ in respective proportion and length across proficiency levels. The findings offer new insights into L2 IC assessment, gaze, and video-mediated interaction research.
We investigated the influence of orthographic transparency, and learners' awareness of it, on the second language (L2) phonolexical encoding of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid-vowel contrasts. In BP, accent marks indicate vowel quality (mid-closed vs. mid-open), resulting in transparent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, whereas words without accents are opaque. To test whether transparency benefits phonolexical encoding of vowel quality, 20 native speakers of American English learning BP completed a perceptual categorization, a lexical decision, and an orthographic knowledge task. Learners perceived the difference between the vowel quality contrasts but confused the vowels lexically. The learner group more easily rejected nonwords created from real words carrying accent marks than nonwords based on words without accents. However, when separating learners into low- and high-awareness groups, the effect remained only for the high-awareness group. The results suggest that orthographic transparency can result in more precise phonolexical encoding, but only for those who are orthographically aware.
