High-level proficiency in late L2 acquisition

The importance of psychological and social factors in adult SLA: The case of productive collocation knowledge in L2 Swedish of L1 French long-term residents

“…Granena and Long (2013) (Spanish L2, Chinese L1) showed that in the late starter group (AO 16-29 years), language aptitude, measured by the LLAMA aptitude test, was a predictor of lexis and collocations and the subtests LLAMA D (sound recognition) and LLAMA E (sound-symbol correspondence) had the strongest effects (LLAMA D, r = .46, LLAMA E, r = .36). A similar result was found by Forsberg Lundell and Sandgren (2013), who investigated the relationship between PCK and aptitude and personality, in a small sample of Swedish L1 users of L2 French (N = 13). Just like Granena and Long (2013), they found an association with LLAMA D (r = .58).…”

“…Based on the previous research, we propose the following hypothesis: PCK will be related to language aptitude (LLAMA) given its importance for collocation knowledge (Forsberg Lundell & Sandgren, 2013;Granena & Long, 2013). It will also be related to target language use (language engagement), based on the results from González-Fernández and Schmitt (2015) and Dąbrowska (2019).…”

Probing the Internal Validity of the LLAMA Language Aptitude Tests

“…An additional small sample of participants also provided verbal reports (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) in their L1 (Swedish). We deemed that participants would be most comfortable providing this kind of introspective feedback in their L1.…”

“…It must be noted, though, that the verbal report format actually encourages participants to try to verbalize their behavior, and in doing so, they maybe more likely to describe conscious cognitive processes as opposed to intuitive or unconscious responses (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1993). Therefore, the verbal reports can hardly be interpreted as evidence against LLAMA D's alleged implicit component.…”

“…The LLAMA, along with its predecessor the LAT (Meara, Milton, & Lorenzo-Dus, 2002), has over the past few years been used in more than 40 studies on a wide variety of topics (for an annotated bibliography, see Appendix S1). Several studies used the LLAMA to examine the role of aptitude in ultimate L2 attainment in naturalistic settings (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008;Forsberg-Lundell & Sandgren, 2013;Granena, 2014;Granena & Long, 2013) and showed that a high degree of aptitude is crucial in order for postadolescent learners to acquire a high level of L2 morphosyntactic proficiency. In the context of instructed language learning, performance on the LLAMA (either the entire battery or subtests thereof) has been shown to correlate with speech fluency and grammatical and lexical complexity (Saito, 2017(Saito, , 2019Saito & Hanzawa, 2016), grammatical knowledge (Yalcin & Spada, 2012; see also Hamrick, 2015), and global proficiency (Artieda & Muñoz, 2016;Larson-Hall & Dewey, 2012).…”