This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis has the status of both “not proven” and unfalsified. The article analyzes a number of reasons for this situation, including the effects of multi-competence, which remove any possibility that competence in more than one language can ever be identical to monolingual competence. With regard to the formal instructional setting, it points to many decades of research showing that, as critical period advocates acknowledge, in a normal schooling situation, adolescent beginners in the long run do as well as younger beginners. The article laments the profusion of definitions of what the critical period for language actually is and the generally piecemeal nature of research into this important area. In particular, it calls for a fuller integration of recent neurolinguistic perspectives into discussion of the age factor in second language acquisition research.

Research in second language acquisition has paid little attention to preliterate children learning a language which is absent from their environment outside the language class. This study examines the acquisition of English words by 24 French-speaking children aged 35–59 months, who were introduced to 57 words, embedded in stories and songs. Four stories and four songs were randomly spread across four consecutive weekly workshops consisting of play-based pedagogical activities. The impact of the input source, number of encounters with each lexical item, animacy as a feature of the lexical items, and first language (L1) lexicon size was examined. Recall of target words was assessed through the selection between four images after hearing the word, and L1 lexicon was assessed through the Peabody test. Results show significantly higher recall for animate concepts, while no difference in recall was found in relation to input source (words in songs vs. stories) or L1 lexicon size. Results also stress the need for a possibly higher number of encounters than that normally found for adults in order to achieve significant recall

Cognates are known to facilitate second language acquisition and use, as learners tend to assign to a new L2 word the meaning of a similar L1 word. Consequently, for L2 tests that rely largely on lexical items, performance may prove inflated for examinees whose L1 shares many cognates with the language being tested. This article examines the possibility of L1 bias on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), a well-established measure of receptive vocabulary knowledge in English. To investigate if performance on the PPVT is affected by cognates, we tested 293 speakers of French and 150 speakers of Polish, since those two languages differ markedly in the number of cognates they share with English. After demonstrating that both groups yield clearly distinct response patterns, descriptive and multivariate statistics confirmed that cognate items enhance test performance: the items with the highest score difference in favour of a language group overwhelmingly consist of cognates for that group only. Mantel-Haenszel and logistic regression show that items that are cognates for one of the two groups are more likely to show differential item functioning than the average items. The results suggest that scores on L2 vocabulary-based tests could be biased by the presence of cognates with the examinee’s first language.

The paper presents an investigation of the extent and nature of cross-linguistic influence on both L2 and L1 phraseological competence of advanced Polish learners of English. We review relevant research studies, which describe various types of collocational deviation from native speaker norms in the language production of advanced learners, and indicate that the collocational choices of learners may be affected by their L1, which results either in incorrect collocations, or in patterns of underuse or overuse. We administered two acceptability judgment tests to 91 Polish advanced learners of English, aged 20–22. The collocations used in the test could be classified with respect to two criteria: firstly, they were either typical or unusual collocations; secondly, they were either congruent with their L1 or L2 equivalents or not. Despite the fact that there is both empirical and theoretical support for the idea that learners may show a preference for those L2 collocations which are congruent with L1, our findings do not support this hypothesis. There is no obvious pattern of cross-linguistic influence emerging from the data. The results of this study seem to give the picture of advanced learners who function in their L2 independently of the L1.

This study investigated possible gender bias on a vocabulary test, using a method suggested by Andrich and Hagquist to detect “real” differential item functioning (DIF). A total of 443 adult ESL learners completed all 228 items of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-IV). The 310 female and 133 male participants were assumed to be of equal competence, corresponding to levels B1 and B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Male participants outscored female participants, possibly due to the multiple-choice format and to the fact that most gender-biased questions favored men rather than women. Finally, our analysis process yielded only seven items out of 228 as showing gender DIF, which is much lower than the numbers reported in the literature for ESL tests. This low figure suggests that the high number of gender-related DIF items reported in previous research might be attributed to the use of DIF detecting methods that do not take into account artificial DIF stemming from the cross-contamination of test items.