Sponsors College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, UHM Department of Second Language Studies, UHM Hawaii Association of Teachers of English as a Second Language (HATESL) HATESL is a student organization within the Department of Second Language Studies. National Foreign Language Resource Center The Language Learning Center, UHM University of Hawaii, Endowment for the Humanities University of Hawaii, Student Equity, Excellence & Diversity xt} Home | Organizers | Sponsors | Call for proposals | Registration | Conference program | Social events | Transportation | Accommodations | Hawai‘i links | Call for 2009 SLRF host | Past SLRF | SLRF '08 FAQs | Presentation guidelines | If you need additional information, please contact us. E-mail: slrf2008@gmail.com Mail address: SLRF 2008, Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai'i 1890 East-West Rd. Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA. Fax: 1-(808) 956-2802 Webdesign by Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, Deborah Masterson, and Yukiko Watanabe

In this presentation I will analyse the variables that are crucial in the discussion of age effects in second language acquisition, and on the basis of the existing empirical evidence from classroom studies I will argue that the amount and quality of the input that learners receive have a significant bearing on the effects that age has on second language learning.

Finally, it will be claimed that age-related studies in foreign language learning settings have yielded significant findings that are more relevant to decisions concerning the time and timing of second language instruction than findings from naturalistic studies, and that these findings can contribute to the development of an integrated explanation of age effects on second language acquisition.

Plenary IV: "Morphological structure in native and non-native language comprehension"
Harald Clahsen (University of Essex) [Sunday, October 19th]
Recent psycholinguistic research on how non-native (L2) speakers comprehend and process language in real time has led to a substantial number of empirical findings on non-native reading and listening, and some theoretical attempts to explain how and why native and non-native processing differ. Two broad accounts have emerged from this research. One view holds that L1 and L2 processing share the same system and mechanisms but that L2 processing is more demanding in terms of basic cognitive processes (e.g. speed of processing) and affected by the learners’ native language. Alternatively, it has been argued that L1 and L2 processing differ in more fundamental ways, for example, with L2 processing relying more on shallow representations of grammatical structure and on full-form lexical storage than L1 processing. This paper presents results on how advanced adult L2 learners (in comparison to adult native speakers) represent and process morphologically complex words. We used different kinds of experimental tasks (e.g. acceptability ratings, speeded grammaticality judgments, masked priming) to examine the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in L2 learners of English and German from typologically different L1 backgrounds. The results from these experiments can only be partially accounted for in terms of cognitive resource limitations or L1 transfer. Instead, we argue that the observed L1/L2 differences support the idea that adult L2 learners are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and rely more on lexical storage than on morphological parsing during processing.

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Home | Organizers | Sponsors | Call for proposals | Registration | Conference program | Social events | Transportation |
Accommodations | Hawai‘i links | Call for 2009 SLRF host | Past SLRF | SLRF '08 FAQs | Presentation guidelines |

If you need additional information, please contact us.
E-mail: slrf2008@gmail.com
Mail address: SLRF 2008, Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai'i
1890 East-West Rd. Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA. Fax: 1-(808) 956-2802
Webdesign by Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, Deborah Masterson, and Yukiko Watanabe