This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such asle secrétaire du psychologue qui se promène (au centre ville)“the secretary of the psychologist who takes a walk (downtown).” Learners' interpretations were affected by the length of the RC, specifically its phonological weight. Effects of intonation contour were found only in a subset of learners. In a response time (RT) experiment that manipulated contexts, fourth-semester learners showed a final bias for NP1 attachment in interpretation but an initial RT bias for NP2 attachment. Second-semester learners also produced a NP2 attachment bias in RTs, but no asymmetry in interpretation was found. We argue that the processing of RC attachment by English-French learners requires a task-specific algorithm that implicates autonomous syntactic and prosodic computations and specific interactions among them.

This study examined how native and near-native speakers of Hexagonal French make reference to future events in a corpus of informal conversations. A concept-oriented analysis reveals that no fewer than 13 different finite verb forms appeared in future-time contexts. A qualitative analysis of the use of the present in future-time contexts in the two portions of the corpus points to similarities in the native-speaker and near-native-speaker use. This analysis contributes to the understanding of future-time expression in Hexagonal French and to discussions concerning near-nativeness in second language acquisition.

The current study responds to the call for increased dialogue among different areas of additional language research. Specifically, we bring together learner corpus research and variationist approaches to second language acquisition to advance learner corpus research in two ways: (a) by modeling interlanguage development and variability and (b) by conducting an analysis that moves away from descriptive error analysis. To accomplish this goal, we analyzed grammatical gender marking in additional language Spanish. The data come from LANGSNAP, a longitudinal learner corpus. Through the use of a generalized linear mixed‐effects model (a multivariate, quantitative analysis), we revealed new information about the development and variable use of gender marking in additional language Spanish. Through our analyses, we hope to contribute to greater interactions among researchers working in different strands of additional language research.

The purpose of the current study was to explore if and how additional-language learners may show changes in phraseological patterns over the course of a stay in a target-language environment. In particular, we focused on noun+adjective combinations produced by a group of additional-language speakers of French at three points in time, spanning 21 months and including an academic year in France. We extracted each combination from a longitudinal corpus and determined frequency counts and two strength-of-association measures (Mutual information [MI] score and Log Dice) for each combination. Separate analyses were conducted for frequency and the strength-of-association measures, revealing that phraseological patterns are significantly predicted by adjective position in the case of all three measures, and that MI scores showed significant change over time. We interpret the results in light of past research that has reported contradictory findings concerning change in phraseological patterns following an immersion experience.

This article investigates variable future-time expression among native speakers of Hexagonal French who participated in informal conversations. The quantitative analysis is the first to examine the inflectional future, periphrastic future, and present indicative as separate forms within a single statistical model of French oral production. Results indicate that temporal distance and presence/absence of a temporal expression predict use of these verb forms. The second phase of the analysis focused on the use of the present indicative in future-time contexts. The examination of each instance of the present indicative shows that an immediate lexical temporal indicator is not necessary for this form to convey futurity and that future-time reference is often established at the discourse level and occasionally through apparent shared knowledge between the interlocutors. This investigation suggests the value of including the present indicative in the analysis of future-time reference in Hexagonal French in order to fully capture variation.