This study investigated the use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in word recognition by Mandarin‐speaking English learners, Korean‐speaking English learners, and native English listeners. Unlike English and Mandarin, Korean does not have lexical stress. Participants completed a visual‐world eye‐tracking experiment that examined whether listeners’ word recognition is constrained by suprasegmental cues to stress alone or by a combination of segmental and suprasegmental cues. Results showed that English listeners used both suprasegmental cues alone and segmental and suprasegmental cues together to recognize English words, with the effect of stress being greater for combined cues. Conversely, Mandarin listeners used stress in lexical access only when stress was signaled by suprasegmental cues alone, and Korean listeners did so only when stress was signaled by segmental and suprasegmental cues together. These results highlight the importance of a cue‐based approach to the study of stress in word recognition. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS Repository at https://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

In certain English finite complement clauses, inclusion of the complementizer that is optional. Previous research has identified various factors that influence when native speakers tend to produce or omit the complementizer, including syntactic weight, clause juncture constraints, and predicate frequency. The present study addresses the question to what extent German and Spanish learners of English as a second language (L2) produce and omit the complementizer under similar conditions. 3,622 instances of English adjectival, object, and subject complement constructions were retrieved from the International Corpus of English and the German and Spanish components of the International Corpus of Learner English. A logistic regression model suggests that L2 learners’ and natives’ production is largely governed by the same factors. However, in comparison with native speakers, L2 learners display a lower rate of complementizer omission. They are more impacted by processing-related factors such as complexity and clause juncture, and less sensitive to verb-construction cue validity.

This study investigates whether listeners’ experience with a second language learned later in life affects their use of fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue to word boundaries in the segmentation of an artificial language (AL), particularly when the cues to word boundaries conflict between the first language (L1) and second language (L2). F0 signals phrase-final (and thus word-final) boundaries in French but word-initial boundaries in English. Participants were functionally monolingual French listeners, functionally monolingual English listeners, bilingual L1-English L2-French listeners, and bilingual L1-French L2-English listeners. They completed the AL-segmentation task with F0 signaling word-final boundaries or without prosodic cues to word boundaries (monolingual groups only). After listening to the AL, participants completed a forced-choice word-identification task in which the foils were either non-words or part-words. The results show that the monolingual French listeners, but not the monolingual English listeners, performed better in the presence of F0 cues than in the absence of such cues. Moreover, bilingual status modulated listeners’ use of F0 cues to word-final boundaries, with bilingual French listeners performing less accurately than monolingual French listeners on both word types but with bilingual English listeners performing more accurately than monolingual English listeners on non-words. These findings not only confirm that speech segmentation is modulated by the L1, but also newly demonstrate that listeners’ experience with the L2 (French or English) affects their use of F0 cues in speech segmentation. This suggests that listeners’ use of prosodic cues to word boundaries is adaptive and non-selective, and can change as a function of language experience.

This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners' construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-idiomatic, and (ii) German learners are overall more attuned to native-like choices than Spanish learners. A preliminary case study suggests that Spanish ESL teaching materials may benefit from incorporating results of corpus-based analyses of authentic language such as the present one. The present study seeks to close the gap between learner language research and ESL teaching materials, and to raise awareness about the gradual nature of second language proficiency.Este estudio presenta un análisis contrastivo del uso de completivas de gerundio e infinitivo producidas por parte de estudiantes españoles y alemanes de inglés como lengua extranjera, así como hablantes nativos de esta lengua. Un análisis de más de 1.100 ejemplos de las estructuras estudiadas obtenidos a partir del Corpus Internacional de Estudiantes de Inglés revela que (i) las construcciones utilizadas por los estudiantes más avanzados no son necesariamente agramaticales, aunque a menudo no sean idiomáticas, y (ii) los estudiantes alemanes son, en general, más sensibles a las opciones nativas que los estudiantes españoles. Un estudio preliminar sugiere que los materiales didácticos para la enseñanza de inglés para los hablantes nativos de español podrían beneficiarse de los resultados obtenidos mediante el análisis de la lengua en uso que se encuentra en un corpus, como el actual. El presente artículo tiene por objeto cerrar la brecha entre la investigación de la lengua empleada por los estudiantes y los materiales didácticos para la enseñanza de inglés como lengua extranjera, y así crear conciencia sobre el carácter gradual del aprendizaje de una segunda lengua.

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