Judgment tasks (JTs, often called acceptability or grammaticality judgment tasks) are found extensively throughout the history of second language (L2) research (Chaudron, 1983). Data from such instruments have been used to investigate a range of hypotheses and phenomena, from generativist theories to instructional effectiveness. Though popular and convenient, JTs have engendered considerable controversy, with concerns often centered on their construct validity in terms of the type of representations they elicit, such as implicit or explicit knowledge (Ellis, 2005; Vafaee et al., 2016). A number of studies have also examined the impact of JT conditions such as timed vs. untimed, oral vs. written (e.g., Murphy, 1997; Spada et al., 2015). This paper presents a synthesis of the use of JTs and a meta-analysis of the effects of task conditions on learner performance. Following a comprehensive search, 385 JTs were found in 302 individual studies. Each report was coded for features related to study design as well as methodological, procedural, and psychometric properties of the JTs. These data were synthesized in order to understand how this type of instrument has been implemented and reported. In addition to observing a steady increase in the use of JTs over the last four decades, we also found many of the features of JTs, when reported, varied substantially across studies. In terms of the impact of JT design, whereas modality was not found to have a strong or stable effect on learner performance (median d=.14; IQR=1.04), scores on untimed JTs tended to be substantially higher than when timed (d=1.35; IQR=1.74). In examining these features and their links to findings, this paper builds on a growing body of methodological syntheses of L2 research instrumentation (e.g., Derrick, 2016; Marsden et al., in press) and makes a number of empirically grounded recommendations for future studies involving JTs.

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Evidence from child language development supports the position that overt subjects in Southern Romance languages are left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents. Specifically, overt subjects begin to be used at the same time as other less controversially left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents, such as fronted objects and wh-questions. However, this interpretation of the data would be much more compelling if it could be shown that these constituents do not emerge at the same time in the speech of children learning languages in which overt subjects are obligatory and largely independent of discourse considerations, such as German. To this end, we examined the speech of three longitudinally studied Spanish-speaking children, Carlos, Eduardo and Graciela, and the speech of two longitudinally studied German-speaking children, Simone and Caroline. We also examined the German data of Katrin and Andreas, which was collected on a single day for each. While the Spanish-speaking children begin productively using overt subjects, fronted objects and wh-questions at a statistically similar point in development, the German-speaking children's data show that overt subjects begin to be used significantly earlier than do fronted elements and wh-questions. This supports the argument that child Southern Romance and child German are different with respect to the timing of the development of these constituents. We believe that this reflects the children's early knowledge of the structure of their target adult languages, which in the case of Southern Romance, includes left-peripheral, discourse-sensitive subjects.

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Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts an order of emergence of morphosyntactic elements in second language (L2) production data. This research investigates whether the same order of emergence can be detected in L2 reception data, specifically, data from a timed audio grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The results from three related studies are reported. Overall, evidence from two groups of learners of English as an L2 who took an audio GJT does not demonstrate the order of emergence predicted by PT. However, results from a production task followed the predicted order. These findings suggest that the processing routines in PT are operative during production only, raising questions about PT and the interconnectedness of the productive and receptive systems.