Language fundamentally defines and distinguishes us as humans, as members of society, and as individuals. As we go through life, our relationship with language and with learning shifts and changes, but it remains significant. This book is an up-to-date resource for graduate students and researchers in second language (L2) acquisition who are interested in language learning across the lifespan. The main goal is to survey and evaluate what is known about the linguistic-cognition-affect assoc...

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and deve...

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning and end of secondary school, thereby offering a long-term view of the teenage experience of foreign language learning. The study scrutinised fac...

This edited volume provides an overview of current thinking and directions for further research in applied linguistics by bringing together in a single volume a range of perspectives regarding original research agendas and innovative methodological approaches. It focuses not only on the challenges that applied linguistics researchers have been facing in recent years but also on producing workable and productive research designs and on identifying ways of how alternatives to conventional re...

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and ...

How are two or more languages learned and contained in the same mind or the same community? This handbook presents an up-to-date view of the concept of multi-competence, exploring the research questions it has generated and the methods that have been used to investigate it. The book brings together psychologists, sociolinguists, Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, and language teachers from across the world to look at how multi-competence relates to their own areas of study. Thi...

The Acquisition of L2 Phonology is a wide-ranging new collection which explores various aspects of the acquisition of an L2 phonological system. It covers L2 speech production and perception, theoretical conceptualisations of L2 phonology acquisition, and the importance of the mastery of highly intelligible pronunciation as an important component of L2 education.

Pragmatics has grown considerably in its relatively short history, from its original disciplinary influences in philosophy and linguistics, into a multidisciplinary field that encompasses a range of theoretical and empirical concerns. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the diversity of these intellectual interests in a comprehensive, single-volume edition. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia covers concepts and theories that have traditionally been associated with pragmatics,...

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts ...

Providing a solid foundation in second language acquisition, this book has become the leading introduction to the subject for students of linguistics, psychology and education, and trainee language teachers. Now in its third edition, the textbook offers comprehensive coverage of fundamental concepts, including second language acquisition (SLA) in adults and children, in formal and informal learning contexts, and in diverse socio-cultural settings, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, e...

Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years. The field of Second language acquisition (SLA, for short) investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, after the first language --in the case of monolinguals-- or languages --in the case of bilinguals-- have already been acquired. Understanding Second Language A...

'Language attrition' describes the loss of, or changes to, grammatical and other features of a language as a result of declining use by speakers who have changed their linguistic environment and language habits. In such a situation there may, for example, be simplification in the tense system or in certain properties of subordinate clauses; some vocabulary items might fall into disuse and phonetic features may be restructured. These changes can be affected by features of the speaker's envi...