Input is a central, driving component in nearly all theories of second language acquisition, but little is known about the relationship between the instructor-provided input to which classroom second language learners are exposed and attested patterns of acquisition. Our study investigates this relationship through an examination of instructors’ Spanish subject expression in oral and written classroom input, as well as their subject expression during three sociolinguistic tasks. Our analysis of five native-speaking instructors’ subject expression, a variable structure, revealed several common patterns across input modes, such as the distribution of the three most common subject forms, as well as subtle differences in the factors constraining use across input modes and tasks. Findings are discussed in relationship to what is known about the acquisition of Spanish subject forms by second language learners, and implications and areas for future research are outlined.

This study investigates the relationship between the accuracy of second language lexical representations and perception, phonological short-term memory, inhibitory control, attention control, and second language vocabulary size. English-speaking learners of Spanish were tested on their lexical encoding of the Spanish /ɾ-r/, /ɾ-d/, /r-d/, and /f-p/ contrasts through a lexical decision task. Perception ability was measured with an oddity task, phonological short-term memory with a serial non-word recognition task, attention control with a flanker task, inhibitory control with a retrieval-induced inhibition task, and vocabulary size with the X_Lex vocabulary test. Results revealed that differences in perception performance, inhibitory control, and attention control were not related to differences in lexical encoding accuracy. Phonological short-term memory was a significant factor, but only for the /r-ɾ/ contrast. This suggests that when representations contain sounds that are differentiated along a dimension not used in the native language, learners with higher phonological short-term memory have an advantage because they are better able to hold the relevant phonetic details in memory long enough to be transferred to long-term representations. Second language vocabulary size predicted lexical encoding across three of the four contrasts, such that a larger vocabulary predicted greater accuracy. This is likely because the acquisition of more phonologically similar words forces learners’ phonological systems to create more detailed representations in order for such words to be differentiated. Overall, this study suggests that vocabulary size in the second language is the most important factor in the accuracy of lexical representations.

The current study examines the variable use of verbal subjects (e.g., explicit yo hablo vs. null hablo ‘[I] speak’), in oral production by five native-speaking instructors directed to Spanish foreign language (FL) learners in a university setting. Our data consisted of instructors’ oral presentation of grammar-focused tasks in one to three Spanish FL lessons. Results demonstrate individual differences in patterns of use by instructor, and are interpreted in the context of learners’ acquisition of subject expression (e.g., Abreu, 2009; Geeslin, 2011a, 2011b; Geeslin, Linford, & Fafulas, 2015; Geeslin, Linford, Fafulas, Long, & Díaz-Campos, 2012) and patterns of variable use by native speakers across out-of-classroom settings and tasks (e.g., Abreu, 2009; Geeslin, 2006; Geeslin & Gudmestad, 2008a, 2008b). An exploration of individual characteristics such as country of origin (i.e., regional dialect), age of learning of English, years in the United States, and years teaching Spanish provides further evidence of the complex nature of this phenomenon. Future areas of investigation of instructor classroom input, particularly in relation to learner opportunities for use and development of variable structures, are outlined.

Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can be used to predict discriminability and can be compared to various acoustic or phonological dimensions to determine the relevant cues for listeners. The viability of this method was examined for both a segmental contrast (German vowels) and a nonsegmental contrast (Finnish phonemic length). Perceptual similarity data from the free classification task accurately predicted discriminability in an oddity task and separately provided rich information on how the perceptual space is shaped. These results suggest that a free classification task and related analyses are informative and replicable methods for examining nonnative speech perception.

The current study examines the production of the Spanish trill by advanced second language (L2) learners using a variationist approach. Findings indicate that learners produced less multiple occlusion trills than native speakers and their variation was not constrained by the same factors as native speakers. Phonetic context conditioned the use of the multiple occlusion variant for native speakers, whereas frequency and speaker sex conditioned this variation for learners, and in the opposite direction of effect as expected from previous native speaker research. Nevertheless, the majority of tokens produced by learners were other variants also produced by native speakers, and when the variation between native and non-native variants was examined, learners’ variation was conditioned not only by frequency, but also phonetic context. Some of the phonetic contexts in which learners produced non-native variants were comparable to those in which native speakers were least likely to produce the multiple occlusion trill, indicating that articulatory constraints governed variation in trill production similarly for both groups. Thus, although L2 learners do not exhibit native-like trill variation, they appear to be developing toward a more native-like norm. These insights provide support for adopting a multifaceted variationist approach to the study of L2 phonological variable structures.

This study examined the accuracy of English-speaking learners of Spanish in storing L2 sounds within cognates and noncognates, specifically in words containing 〈g〉 and 〈h〉, which have differing cross-linguistic phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In the first task, participants heard Spanish words with target-like pronunciations of 〈g〉 and 〈h〉 or inaccurate pronunciations with an English-like phonemic substitution for these graphemes, and they decided whether or not they were words. The second task had participants decide between the two pronunciations of each Spanish word and select the accurate pronunciation. The findings in both tasks showed that for L2 learners, 〈h〉 cognate words had less accurate phonological representations compared to all other conditions, possibly due to the greater consistency in phoneme-grapheme correspondence for 〈h〉 in English. These results show that cognate status and orthographic (in)congruity interact to influence the accuracy of L2 lexical encoding.