We investigate Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants' acquisition of the variable (ing), which occurs in progressive tenses, participles, noun phrases, etc., and which can be pronounced [iŋ] or [In]. A VARBRUL 2 program analysis of native speaker speech shows that the production of (ing) is constrained by phonological, grammatical, stylistic, and social factors. An analysis of the nonnative speakers' acquisition of these norms shows that [In] is more frequent before anterior segments (reflecting ease of articulation), and that males use [In] more frequently than females, especially in monitored speech (perhaps reflecting their desire to accommodate to a male native speaker norm rather than to an overall native speaker norm). The analysis also shows evidence of grammatical constraints which are different from those in the native speakers' speech. This difference may reflect the fact that it is easier to acquire the [In] variant in “frozen forms,” such as prepositions, than in productive rules.

The validity of two implicational universals regarding consonant clusters was tested in an analysis of the interlanguage of 11 subjects who were native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The results were strongly supportive of the two universals, suggesting the possibility that primary language universals hold also for nonprimary languages.

Nonsectarian Pennsylvania Germans who are the first generation in their families to learn English natively, often attempt to learn the Pennsylvania German that their families no longer regularly use. This study assesses the process of acquiring a dying language by investigating learners' use of the Pennsylvania German dative case. Learning strategies are remarkably free of reliance on English rules. Evidence indicates that speakers rely on what they have learned and seek analogies within Pennsylvania German, resorting to English only when other strategies fail. The search for near-congruity identified as operative across languages operates within the learner language as internal analogy. Learners also seek to maximize the distance between English and Pennsylvania German and emphasize the distinctiveness of each.

The major purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of integrative motivation and instrumental motivation on the learning of French/English vocabulary. Integrative motivation was defined in terms of a median split on scores obtained on subtests from the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery, while instrumental motivation was situationally determined in terms of monetary reward for doing well. The results demonstrated that both integrative motivation and instrumental motivation facilitated learning. Other results indicated that instrumentally motivated students studied longer than noninstrumentally motivated students when there was an opportunity to profit from learning, but this distinction disappeared when the incentive was removed. Both integratively and instrumentally motivated students spent more time thinking about the correct answer than those not so motivated, suggesting that both elements have an energizing effect. A secondary purpose of this study was to assess the consequences of computer administration of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery. In this respect the results were most encouraging. Computer administration appeared not to detract from the internal consistency reliability of the subscales used, and moreover there was an indication that an index of reaction time to individual items might provide a way of identifying social desirability responding

In their recent contribution on the Garden Path Technique, Tomasello and Herron (1989) suggested that the experimental results they obtained on this means of providing negative feedback lend support to a “cognitive comparison model” of second language (L2) acquisition, and they further hypothesize that it may be useful in eliminating other L2 overgeneralizations. The results Tomasello and Herron (henceforth TH) present are clearly interesting, for they appear to show that negative evidence—here, a special type of error correction—may be crucial in L2 learning. As promising as the TH results may be, however, there is reason to believe that they also should be viewed with caution. In the following, we provide some of the reasons why caution should be taken.