Language anxiety is a prevalent phenomenon in second language learning. This experiment examines the arousal of anxiety caused by the introduction of a video camera at various points in a vocabulary learning task. Seventy-two students of 1st-year university French were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (a) one group who had anxiety aroused during their initial exposure to the stimuli, (b) a second group who had anxiety aroused when they began to learn the meanings of the words, (c) a third group who had anxiety aroused when they were asked to produce the French word (when prompted with the English), and (d) a control group who did not experience anxiety arousal. Significant increases in state anxiety were reported in all three groups when the video camera was introduced, and concomitant deficits in vocabulary acquisition were observed. It is concluded that the stage at which anxiety arises has implications for any remedial action taken to reduce the effects of language anxiety.

This paper focuses on the process of Japanese learners' acquisition ofthe locality requirement of English reflexives. Previous studies seem to agree that the initial hypothesis of learners is an overgeneral one that allows nonlocal binding. Research findings diverge, however, as to whether or not learners can approximate the target grammar without the help of negativeevidence as their overall proficiency in English increases. This paper provides evidence of a successful retreat from the initial overgeneral hypothesis. In an attempt to explain the observed progress, it is suggested that a nonsyntactic aspect of language plays a role here, that is, viewpoint in sentence processing. This notion may help us to specify the type of evidence that can trigger learners' progress in the acquisition of the English reflexive.

This paper reports on a competition model experiment designed to investigate the sentence-processing strategies of English-speaking learners of Japanese (JFL learners) and Japanese-speaking learners of English. The participants were required to identify the sentence subject of a series of English and Japanese word strings, each consisting of one verb and two nouns, in which noun-animacy, word-order, and case-marking cues either competed or were consistent with each other. The results indicated a correlation between learners' proficiency in Japanese and case-marker dependency in Japanese strings. JFL learners primarily resorted to animacy cues to interpret Japanese strings, suggesting a prepotent role for lexical semantics. There was little evidence of transfer of surface word order, although some JFL learners resorted to the Japanese canonical SOV order to a greater extent than the native Japanese.

This study concerns the ability of adults to achieve nativelike competence in second language when the acquisition context lacks formal instruction and, therefore, more closely resembles the environment for first language acquisition. The study presents the results of extensive testing of an adult who has apparently acquired native proficiency in Egyptian Arabic (EA) in an untutored setting. The goal is to determine to what extent her linguistic competence matches that of native speakers. Measures employed to assess her level of achievement are a speech production task, a grammaticality judgment task, a translation task, an anaphoric interpretation task, and an accent recognition task. Results are compared to those of native speakers as well as to those of a proficient learner of EA with extensive formal instruction. The results lead the authors to reexamine the critical period hypothesis while addressing the role of talent in adult language learning. The study concludes with an evaluation of our subject's language learning history to discover what factors differentiate her from less successful naturalistic adult acquirers.