Research Report for project RES-000-22-2645: Native-like ... · represent a wide range of age of first exposure to English. Twelve years exposure was considered to be a necessary

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Research Report for project RES-000-22-2645: NNative-like selection in second language acquisition: the effects of age, aptitude and socialisation

1. Background.

In a generative model of language (e.g. Chomsky 1965) a knowledge of grammatical rules gives humans the potential to create an infinite number of novel utterances. Yet any observation of language in use, especially through corpus analysis, shows that speakers do not exploit this capacity to anything like its full potential, preferring instead to piece together utterances out of word combinations used by everyone in the speech community. (See, for example, Becker 1976, Pawley and Syder 1983, Widdowson 1989) . These well-worn combinations can be as short as two-word collocations (Good evening, crying shame, dead end) and long as whole phrases (Far be it from me, to cut a long story short, on top of all that) or else sentence ‘frames’ needing a few additions (That’s the last time I’ll ever ask NP to VP for me.) To native speakers these sound natural and familiar because they have been encountered many times before, whereas their paraphrased grammatical equivalents (Enjoyable evening, shortening a long story) sound odd because they have not been encountered before. Recycling familiar bits of language is more than a strategy to cope with the pressure of real time speech because it figures equally in writing. It is a pervasive and defining characteristic of any native speaker’s linguistic performance. In some accounts (e.g. Wray 2000) it comprises up to 80% of language use.

Such recycling of word choices is interesting evidence for how language is acquired by children. Nativist (i.e. Chomskyan) accounts argue that human babies come to the task pre-wired with an innate Universal Grammar which allows them to decode the grammar of the language(s) they are exposed to. But more recent emergentist approaches (e.g. Ellis, 1996)suggest that young children discover the grammatical rules of their first language simply through repeated and lengthy exposure to samples of it. A relatively simple feedback mechanism ‘chunks’ together individual elements (be these phonemes, lexemes, or words in phrases) through repeated association. As higher level chunks develop, these are used as a filter which allows their more ready perception and further strengthens their representations in long term memory. Our phonological Short Term Memory (pSTM) is key to this process; it enables us to hold phonological sequences of language in mind for a brief period, laying the initial traces used in the bootstrapping described above.

However, simply encoding in memory thousands upon thousands of exemplars of language would not enough to account for nativelike competence; our ability to perceive patterns in phonological sequences allows for their implicit induction over countless hours on task. Thus pSTM plays a key role in enabling native speakers to sound nativelike. Consequently, a native speaker’s knowledge of any word includes a detailed memory of its associated grammatical and semantic structures, what Cook (1997) describes as the accretion of its ‘individual idiosyncrasies’. And it is this accretion of knowledge which explains why native speakers do not produce grammatical but un-nativelike combinations such as:

His books commanded criticism from many people.I am doing this exam because I want to achieve a step in my career.She won many competitions, forming fame in the process.

McCarthy (1990) quoted in Read (2000)

To cite this output: Foster, Pauline (2009). Native-like selection in second language acquisition: the effects of age, aptitude and socialisation: Full Research Report ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-2645. Swindon: ESRC

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Whereas a wealth of evidence (see Clark 2003) shows that first language learners build both system knowledge (grammatical rules) and knowledge of use (nativelike selections), there is currently little research into the extent to which second language learners do the same. Second language acquisition (SLA) research has concentrated mostly on how learners develop system knowledge. This is surprising, given that one of the most obvious features of second language (L2) use is that it can be, as in the three examples quoted above, completely grammatical but unnatural, indicating that the speaker has knowledge of L2 grammar but not of L2 word selection. As ‘grammatical but unnatural’ is not a characteristic of first language use, it is interesting to explore what makes it so common, inevitable even, in L2 use. Several factors are possible. It could be the learners’ acculturation to the L2 community and their motivation to integrate into it. It could be learners’ pSTM span and pattern recognition ability. None of these variables has any impact on child language acquisition (Clark 2003), and so the key factor could be age of first exposure to the L2. Age effects on grammatical attainment in an L2 have been convincingly demonstrated by a number of well-known studies( Patkowski 1980, Johnson and Newport 1989; DeKeyser 2001.) While there is, of course, a considerable amount of research interest into L2 learners’ vocabulary acquisition (e.g. Read 1990, Meara 1998) these are almost entirely concerned with word recognition, not with knowledge of word selection, or with age effects. Thus SLA research is lagging behind first language studies and has yet properly to explore the dual nature of L2 processing.

2 Objectives.The proposed study set out to investigate the ability of learners of English to discriminate reliably between native and non-native selections, and to explore whether this is related to a range of independent variables: age of first exposure (Critical Period effects); breadth and depth of exposure (acculturation and motivation effects); phonological short term memory (language aptitude effects). These independent variables inform seven research questions:

To what extent is the ability to build a memory store of native-like selections related to a learner’s:1. age of first exposure to the L2?2. length of exposure to the L2? 3. living within rather than outside the target language community?4. degree of acculturation to the target language community?5. motivation to acquire a high level attainment?6. language aptitude, as measured through pSTM?7. ultimate grammatical attainment in the L2?

A number of objectives were set in order to explore these questions, many related to the development of suitable research instruments:

i) To explore all seven research questions it was necessary to devise an instrument to measure receptive knowledge of what is and is not a native-like selection.

The native-like selection test (NLST) used in the pilot study was developed further. In the pilot, participants read a phishing email text about internet banking security. It contained a number of word combinations which were grammatical but not nativelike, and the participants were required to identify them. For this research project it was decided to use something more accessible to older participants who might not be acquainted with the


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language and protocols of internet banking. Two short stories were used, one about a game of football (195 words) and the other about a picnic (130 words). The texts were taken from authentic transcripts of L2 English learners telling these stories from picture prompts. All grammatical errors were corrected but the un-nativelike word selections were left alone. After trialling with ten native speaker informants, a total of 24 word combinations in the stories emerged as un-nativelike. The judgements were nearly but not completely unanimous. If one or two informants accepted a selection while eight or nine rejected it, we still deemed it un-nativelike.

(ii) For questions 2 and 3 we needed to recruit at least sixty participants, all born outside the UK, who had acquired a level of proficiency in English enabling them to function successfully in all aspects of life (B1/B2 on Common European Framework) and who each had at least twelve years of exposure to the language. Half of these should be living outside an English-speaking environment. For question 1, it was necessary that the participants represent a wide range of age of first exposure to English.

Twelve years exposure was considered to be a necessary minimum time for a learner to have reached his or her ultimate attainment in English. This avoided the criticism levelled at previous studies into age effects on SLA, (such as Johnson and Newport (1989) that the participants were tested before they had reached their ultimate attainment. DeKeyser (2000) set ten years as a minimum, and we extended that to twelve for this study. We exceeded our minimum target by recruiting a total of eighty Polish L1 participants, forty in the UK and forty in Poland. Each met all necessary criteria.

(iii) To explore question six, the objective was to devise an instrument to test participants’ phonological short-term memory.

A test of pSTM would tap into the facet of aptitude most associated with implicit pattern recognition, and ultimately most associated with sequence learning. Superlab software was used to create a test based on a grid of four colours. Participants were asked to reproduce a series of 82 sequences of these colour names, ranging in length from 4 to 8 elements. After hearing a sequence orally presented in their L1 (Polish) they used the mouse to click on the colours in serial order whilst repeating the sequence aloud.In trials it was found to take 40 minutes and be very tiring so was consequently reduced to of 62 sequences. We measured pSTM span as the total of correctly repeated sequences.

(iv) To explore questions 4 and 5 a questionnaire was created to explore the degree to which each participant was socialised into English, through leisure and work contact with the language. The questionnaire would determine the degree to which the participants use English rather than Polish in their daily lives.

This was achieved by adapting and expanding Freed (2004). A questionnaire with 20 items explored their English learning background, and the extent to which they use English with family, friends and colleagues. Their reading, writing and viewing habits were explored, as were attitudes towards British culture and their motivation to acquire English to a high degree of competence.


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(v). To explore question 7, it was necessary to measure the participants’ ability to make grammaticality judgements in English.

Following Johnson and Newport (1988) and Dekeyser (2000) this objective was achieved through a grammaticality judgement test (GJT) in which participants listen to sentences of English and judge whether or not they are grammatical. Dekeyser cut the GJT devised by Johnson and Newport from 276 sentences to 200 on the grounds that the original taxed participants’ concentration too much. Given that we were going to be asking our participants to do a questionnaire, a test of pSTM and a possibly tiring NLST, we cut this total further to 110 items.

(vi) For both the GJT and NLST an important objective was to gather native-speaker baseline data.

This was achieved by recruiting 20 UK-born monolingual native speakers of English, none of whom had a background in linguistics or language teaching. Their scores on the GJT and NLST were used to give the native-speaker range against which to compare the Polish-born participants’ scores.

The final objectives of the project were to determine through correlation analyses the relationship between knowledge of native-like selection and the other variables, and also to explore the implications the findings might have for theories of language in general and second language acquisition in particular. These are reported on below in sections four and seven respectively.

3. Methods.

As described above, the participants were eighty adult Polish- born speakers of English, half were resident in the UK and half were resident in Poland. All were bilingual in Polish and English. They had responded to advertisements in local media and cultural centres, and all fitted the bill of being frequent (i.e. daily) users of English at a level of B1/B2 on Common European Framework, and with at least twelve years’ exposure to the language. The age range at testing was 19-79 in the UK and 19-59 in Poland. Twenty adult monolingual native speakers of English were also recruited, aged between their late 20s and late 50s.

(a) Instruments� The grammaticality judgment test (GJT) consisted of 110 sentences recorded onto a

digital data file, spoken alternately by a female and a male voice in Received Pronunciation. Each sentence was read twice, with a three second pause between them. Half of the sentences were correct and half contained an error (e.g. *He really wants play football). Participants checked off on an answer sheet which sentences were grammatical and which ungrammatical.

� The nativelike selection test (NLST) consisted of two stories based on picture prompts concerning a lost football, and a ruined picnic. Authentic non-native speaker transcripts were used for these stories with the grammar corrected but the non-native


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word choices left in (e.g. The ball came up by floating). Native speaker trialling deemed there to be 24 non-native selections in the stories. Participants were assured the stories contained no grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors. They were asked to read the stories and underline anything they found odd in expression.

� The questionnaire had 20 items. It explored the breadth and depth of the participants’ daily usage of English, their attitudes to British life and culture, and their motivation to be highly competent users of English.

� The phonological short term memory test (pSTM) required participants to look at a screen on which four colours (red, green, blue and yellow) were presented on a 4-square grid. They listened to a recorded voice saying (in Polish) sequences of these colours. The sequences were between 4 to 8 items in length. Participants used a computer mouse to click the colours on the grid in the order they had heard them. There were 3 practice sequences and then 62 test sequences. Superlab recorded their mouse clicks. A weighted span score was created for each participant. This means that each correctly entered sequence was scored as the number of its constituent elements (e.g. a correctly entered sequence of four elements would be scored as four points), and these were then totalled. Each participant’s total span (TotSpan) was therefore the sum of correctly entered sequences in the learning and testing, but not practice, phases. In order to be judged as correct, all elements had to be entered in the correct serial order.

TotSpan = �� n * length n)

(b) Procedure

Each Polish-born participant was tested in the following manner. After an initial contact to ensure that he or she fitted the requirements of the project, the participant was visited at a convenient place, usually their own home. The procedures were explained, it was stressed that the participant could stop at any time, and that no evaluation or judgement of any individual’s English ability was being made. Four instruments were administered in the following order: pSTM, NLST, GJT, questionnaire. A payment of £30 or 150 PLN was made to each participant for their time. The native speakers did only the GJT and NLST, following the same procedures for the Polish participants. They were not paid.

4. Results.For the sake of brevity and clarity, the initial results are presented here for each of the seven research questions in turn, as scatterplots and/or Pearson correlations. Where appropriate the UK and the Polish data are presented separately.


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Question 1. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of native-like selections related to their age of first exposure to the L2?

Figure One: Scatterplot for UK participants NLST scores against Age of Onset (i.e age of first exposure): (Native speaker scores are represented as red squares)

Pearson correlations for UK NLST scores with AoO: r= -.718 p < .01

The native speaker scores range from 17- 24 out of a possible 24. This was more spread than expected, due to three native speaker informants having a rather generous attitude to judgements of non-nativeness. Without these, the native speaker range is 19-24 out of 24. Nevertheless, even with these, Figure One shows a significant negative relationship between age of onset and NLST scores for the UK participants. With one exception, those with first exposure to English before age 12 scored within the native speaker range. With two exceptions, those with age of first exposure to English scored below the native speaker range (and in most cases well below it).


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Figure Two: Scatterplot for Poland participants’ NLST scores against Age of Onset (i.e age of first exposure). (Native speaker scores are represented as red squares.)

Pearson correlations for Poland NLST scores with AoO: r =-.277 ns

.

Figure two shows a very different pattern. A few Poland participants, all but one of whom were exposed to English before the age of ten, have scored within the bottom of the native speaker range, Generally, however, the scores appear to have a normal distribution, with no-one scoring in the higher native speaker range of 19-24.. The Pearson correlations show a very weak negative correlation which does not reach significance


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Question 2. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of native-like selections related to the length of exposure to the L2?

Figure Three: Scatterplot for UK participants’ NLST scores against Length of Exposure (i.e. length of UK residence.)

Pearson correlations for UK NLST scores with length of exposure: r = .445 p< .01

The native speaker range of 17-24 is achieved here by a cluster of participants with 55 to 65 years of exposure to English, and by a smaller number of participants with 15 to 30 years of exposure. For the rest, who did not score within the native speaker range, there is no clear pattern relating length of exposure to NLST, and there are two participants who, despite 60 years or so of exposure to English, have NLS scores well below the native speaker range. There is also one with 39 years of residence, who scored zero. The Pearson correlation analysis shows a moderate positive relationship overall between NLS ability and length of residence, though it must be born in mind that all but one those scoring in the native-speaker range have an age of onset of below twelve.


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Figure Four: Scatterplot for Poland participants’ NLST scores against years of exposure.

Pearson correlations for Poland NLST scores with years of exposure: r = .450 p< .01

A few Poland participants have scores in the low end of the native-speaker range (17-19) but none scored over 19. There is a discernible positive relationship between NLST scores and length of exposure, revealed also in the correlation analysis, and though it is not a particularly strong one ( r = .450 p< .01) It suggests that NLS ability does improve with length of exposure to the language, while not achieving more than the lower end of NS levels.

Question 3. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of L2 native-like selections lessened by living outside the target language community?

Table one: comparison of mean scores on the NLST for Poland and UK participants

Location N Mean

Std. Deviation

Std. Error Mean

NLST score

UK 40 16.7000 14.90173 2.35617Poland 40 10.2500 5.40536 .85466

p = .012 eta squared = .08


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A comparison of mean scores for NLST shows that the mean for the UK participants is 16.70 out of 24 (s.d. 14.9) while that for the Poland participants is considerably lower at 10.24 out of 24 (s.d 5.4), indicating that the UK participants were better at the task though with a much wider range of scores. A t-test reveals the difference is significant (p = .012) and with a moderate effect size (.08). The data suggests that living outside the target language environment impedes the learners’ ability to build a memory store of L2 nativelike selections, though with the two groups not quite comparable in terms of range of age of onset, some caution is needed in interpretation.

Questions 4 and 5. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of L2 native-like selections related to their degree of acculturation to the target language community and their motivation to acquire a high level attainment?

The questionnaire answers were explored through correlation analyses with the NLST scores, and revealed no obvious relationships in either the Polish or UK data. Only internet use was flagged up as a related to higher scores on GJT and NLST, but this in turn was strongly related to the age of the participant and cannot be seen as a separate factor. The questionnaire was useful in illuminating the unusual characteristics and circumstances of the three outliers shown in figure one above. There is no space to discuss these in full here, but, very briefly, unusual levels of engagement or disengagement with the English speaking community may be the key variable.


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Question 6. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of L2 native-like selections related to their language aptitude, as measured through phonological short term memory?

Figure five: Scatterplot for NLST scores and pSTM span (all participants)

The scatterplot shows clearly that these two variables are not related. As this was against the expectation that pSTM was implicated in the development of intuitions about native-like selections, at least in adult learners, another scatterplot was generated only including participants with age of onset of over 12. This showed the same lack of relationship between the two variables, prompting a final scatterplot to illuminate the relationship between the current age of the participants and their pSTM score.

Figure six: Scatterplot for age at testing and pSTM span (all participants)

.Pearson correlations for age at testing and pSTM span: r = -.615, p < .01


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Here a relationship is clear. Figure six shows that age and pSTM are quite strongly and negatively correlated. Unexpectedly, it appears that pSTM is not a stable trait, and that it diminishes over time, and since we were measuring cognitive traits at least 12 years after the onset of learning, and in many cases several decades after the onset of learning, it is impossible to tell how pSTM might have affected it.

Question 7. To what extent is a learner’s ability to build a memory store of L2 native-like selections related to their ultimate grammatical attainment in the L2?

For UK participants, correlation analyses show the following:GJT scores with Age of Onset: r =-.722 p< .01NLST scores with Age of Onset: r= -.718 p< .01GJT scores with length of exposure: r= .195 nsNLST scores with length of exposure: r = .445 p< .01

The negative correlation between age of onset and ultimate grammatical attainment is high and echoes similar results obtained by both DeKeyser (2000) and Johnson and Newport (1989). It is interesting to see that longer exposure does not bring increasing grammatical ability. While NLST scores are also highly negatively correlated to age of Onset, the development of native-like intuitions for the L2 does improve somewhat over time.

For the Poland participants, correlation analyses show the following:

GJT scores with Age of Onset: r = -.496 p< .01NLST scores with Age of Onset: r= -.277 nsGJT scores with years of exposure: r= .211nsNLST scores with years of exposure: r = .450 p< .01

Here we see that while Age of Onset is also negatively related to ultimate grammatical attainment, the relationship is considerably weaker than for the UK participants. Unlike for the UK participants, there is no significant relationship with NLST scores. And while GJT scores are not related to length of exposure, the NLST scores again have a moderate but significant correlation with this variable.

Summing up.Clearly there is much more work to do on these analyses. However, we can summarise at this

time:

An L2 learner’s ability to build a native-like memory store of word selections depends on both an early start (12 or under) and the massive exposure associated with living inside the target language community. For post-12 learners, an ability to detect non-native selections can continue to improve over time, though not inevitably, and not to full nativelike levels. A few outliers aside, there appears to be no general relationship between this ability and degree of motivation to be native-like, or to be assimilated into the target language community or proportion of daily life conducted in the L2. All these variables seem more related to age.


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Learners who come at a young age to the target language community become more acculturated, more motivated to be native-like, and have more L2 social contacts. Grammatical attainment contrasts with building a memory store of native-like selections in that this does not continue to improve over time. Learners who are living outside the target language community are at a disadvantage in that their exposure to the L2 is more limited, and their GJT and NLST scores are lower overall. An early age of first exposure, and not length of exposure, is related to higher grammatical attainment. But the size of the memory store of native-like selections is positively related to length of exposure.Unexpectedly, pSTM is shown to decline with age and therefore its role in the development of memory for nativelike selections could not properly be explored. The decline is not shown by this data to be abrupt at any point, but more a gradual tailing off.

5. Activities.The project has already generated two major conference presentations: at ACLA1 in Ottawa, May 2009 and at BAAL2 in Newcastle, September 2009. Additionally, two more presentation proposals have been accepted: at AAAL3 in Atlanta, March 2010, and at FLaRN4

There has been one research seminar on the project at St. Mary’s University College, with another lined up for 2010. The Principal Investigator has given a talk on the project to ELTAB

in Paderborn March 2010. The Principal Investigator has given a research seminar on the project at the University of Southampton, and will give similar presentations at the Universities of Nottingham and Bristol in 2010. One of the Research Assistants has presented the results of the project in Poland at the University of Szczecin.

5 in Germany and will be seeking opportunities to present the findings to TESOL6

These findings are hence at odds with models (Krashen 1985, Lewis 1997, 2000) which see the processes of first and second language as essentially the same: the unavoidable, unpreventable, implicit acquisition of knowledge through exposure to linguistic input. The

teachers at UK colleges where she has given presentations before.

6. Outputs.It is too early for the results of the project to have appeared in print, but the three main journal publications in preparation are outlined in section 2A of the report.

7. Impacts.The results obtained here confirm and expand on existing research findings that have shown age effects on ultimate attainment in SLA. While previous studies have looked at grammatical attainment in an L2, this project shows than implicit pattern recognition and memory, which underpin knowledge of what is and is not nativelike, are diminished in adult learners. Living within the target language community, with the concomitant greater exposure to the L2, gives a clear advantage over living outside of it, but even many decades of exposure to the L2 in daily life are not able to compensate fully for an early (under age 12) start.

1 Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics2 British Association of Applied Linguistics3 American Association of Applied Linguistics4 Formulaic Language Research Forum5 English Language Teaching Association of Berlin6 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages


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results of this study indicate such a model is not warranted. Exposure to input can only take an adult learner so far, and not to nativelike knowledge of the idiosyncratic grammatical and semantic structures that associate with individual words. Krashen and Lewis both hold thatfailure to acquire an L2 completely is due to insufficient and/or deficient input. Lewis maintains classroom teachers can put this right by adopting his Lexical Approach to language teaching (2000) in which words and their collocations play the central role. But if very large amounts of L2 exposure coupled with a young age of onset are key to the development of nativelike selection, only limited knowledge of what is and is not a ‘natural’ choice of words could ever be acquired in classrooms by adults. This is not to deny a place to any classroom focus on lexis, but teachers and learners both might feel limited class time is better given to the very much smaller syllabus presented by the L2 grammar.

8. Future Research Priorities.While existing research (e.g. Gathercole 1999) suggests that pSTM span increases as children grow and then stays constant, the data gathered in this project suggests it eventually declines with age. An interesting next step would be to gather comparable pSTM data from children aged, say eight to twelve, to explore the trajectory of this feature. Emergentist approaches to language acquisition (Ellis 1996) give a privileged role to pSTM in very early childhood, though Gathercole’s work indicates that it is not as well developed then as later on. The four colour grid instrument used in this project is likely to be suitable for use with children. It can also be configured around an artificial ‘grammar’ i.e. a set of rules for sequencing the colours, hidden from participants. Measures could be taken of participants’ reaction times to see if these increase over the course of the test, indicating an implicit sequence learning ability. The NLST was promising in illuminating knowledge of nativelike sequences, though it proved harder than expected to get native speaker baseline data due to a few informants’ apparent tendency to give generous rather than intuitive judgements. A better way forward, and one which future research could pursue, might be to use a eye-tracking software (Millar 2009) in which unfamiliar word combinations are shown to cause the reader to ‘double back’. This might give a more robust identification of un-nativelike selections, and consequently a more finely graded assessment of whether L2 learners have recognised them.

9. Ethical considerations.The proposed study raised only two: that the participants should not feel at any stage that that they were being tested, and that all data gathered should be completely anonymised. In effect, names and addresses were never recorded in any way that could be linked to the data itself and were destroyed after the project was finished. During data-collection, the research assistant reassured participants that they were neither ‘passing’ nor ‘failing ‘anything, but merely ‘doing’ something.The project design was approved by the School of CCCA Ethics Committee as conforming to the School Code of Research Ethics.

10. References.

Becker, J.D. (1975) The phrasal lexicon. Report no.3081 Advanced Research Projects. Agency of

the Department of Defense.

Chomsky. N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. M.I.T. Press


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Clark, E. (2003) First Language Acquisition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Cook, V.J. (1997) Inside Language . Arnold

DeKeyser, R. M. (2000). The robustness of critical period effects in second language

acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22

Ellis, N. (1996). Sequencing in SLA: phonological memory, chunking, and points of order.

Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 18 (1) 91-126.

(4), 499-533

Freed, B., Dewey, D., Segalowitz, N. and Halter, R. (2004) The Language Contact Profile

Studies in Second Language Acquisition 26 (2) 349-357

Gathercole, S (1999) Cognitive approaches to the development of short-term memory. Trends

in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 11, 410-419

Johnson, J. S. and Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning:

The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language.

Cognitive Psychology, 21

Krashen, S.D. (1985). The Input Hypothesis. London/New York: Longman

, 60-99.

Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach. Language Teaching Publications

Lewis,M. (2000). Language in the lexical approach. In M. Lewis (ed.), Teaching Collocation:

Further Developments In The Lexical Approach, pp126-154. Hove: Language Teaching

Publications.

McCarthy, M. (1990). Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Meara, P. (1998). Review of second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for

pedagogy. Applied Linguistics, 19, 289-292

Millar, N. (2009) Native speaker processing of learner collocational errors: evidence from

self-paced reading. Paper presented at the 2009 Meeting of the British Association of

Allied Linguistics, Newcastle.

Patkowski, Mark S. (1980) The sensitive period for the acquisition of syntax in a second

language. In: Language Learning 30/80, 449-472

Pawley, A. and Syder, F. (1983) ‘Two puzzles for linguistic theory: native-like selection and

native-like fluency’ in J. Richards and R. Schmidt (eds.) Language and Communication.

London: Longman

Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Widdowson, H. (1989). Knowledge of language and ability for use. Applied Linguistics 10: 128-37

Wray, A. (2000) Formulaic sequences in second language teaching: Principles and practice.

Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21:3 463-489


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Research Report for project RES-000-22-2645: Native-like ... · represent a wide range of age of first exposure to English. Twelve years exposure was considered to be a necessary