White, et al.There are methodological difficulties in investigating second language (L2) learners' knowledge of reflexive binding, particularly in the case of potentially ambiguous sentences where the learner or native speaker may have a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this paper, we compare two truth-value judgment tasks, one involving stories and the other pictures. In both tasks, we provided contexts for different interpretations of potentially ambiguous sentences. We tested a variety of sentence types, including monoclausal sentences with subject or object antecedents (ambiguous in English) and biclausal sentences with local or long-distance antecedents (ambiguous in Japanese). Participants were intermediatelevel Japanese-speaking and French-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL), as well as native speaker controls. The story task yielded a significantly higher proportion of correct acceptances of object antecedents for reflexives, both in the case of ESL learners and

This article reports on a small study investigating whether teaching second language learners the long-distance (LD) properties of the Japanese reflexive zibun ‘self leads to acquisition of its subject-oriented status. The study involved low intermediate level learners of Japanese who were instructed on zibun over a four-week period. The focus of the instruction was that the reflexive zibun can take long-distance antecedents. At the same time, subjects were never taught that the antecedent must be a subject. Subjects were tested using a truth-value judgment task. Results show that the learners initially rejected LD binding; they showed a significant increase in acceptance of LD antecedents after the teaching intervention. Analyses of individual learners show that about half of them successfully acquired the relevant properties of zibun. With one exception, learners did not generalize from their instruction to assume that “anything goes” as far as antecedents for zibun are concerned. Rather, they acquired grammars of reflexive binding that fall within the range permitted by Universal Grammar.

L2 learners are known to be sensitive to acoustic cues beyond the bare minimum required to distinguish target language phonemic contrasts. This paper examines changes in this sensitivity to such extraneous details in the acoustic signal following extended exposure to L2 input. Our Category Activation Threshold Model (CATM) posits that the acquisition of new phonological categories brings about inhibitory mechanisms that actively suppress the processing of acoustic cues not needed for phonemic distinction. To assess the use of acoustic detail at different levels of proficiency, we administered a similarity judgment task to two groups of Japanese learners of English: university students with no study-abroad experience (NoSA: n = 22), and students with 3–12 months experience living and studying in an English-speaking country (SA: n = 18). SA participants judged the acoustic distance between pairs with one native and one non-native segment, /s/~/θ/, /z/~/ð/, to be greater than NoSA participants did. However, the SA group rated the acoustic difference between two utterances of the same stimulus item containing non-native /f/ or /v/ to be smaller than the No-SA group did. This result accords with the CATM, exhibiting the inhibitory effects of category formation.