Justyna Leśniewska

This study examined the relative influence of three factors on gender assignment in L2 French by Polish learners in cases where the noun’s gender was unknown to them. Those three factors are as follows: the form of the noun, transfer effects from the first language (L1), and the assignment of masculine by default. Our participants were 1,115 adult native speakers of Polish who belonged to all levels of French proficiency. We selected 24 words for which both correct and incorrect gender assignment can be explained by only one of the three factors. Those words were presented sequentially online, in isolation, in the form of images accompanied by recordings of their pronunciation. Participants had to indicate which gender they thought the word possessed (masculine or feminine). Bayesian analyses showed all three factors to contribute to gender assignment, explaining up to 43% of the assignment process. Their combined explanatory power decreases as learners become better in French, and it is greater in the case of incorrect gender assignment. While relying mostly on masculine by default at beginning levels, as learners progress in French, they are influenced more by L1 transfer and word endings.

This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis has the status of both “not proven” and unfalsified. The article analyzes a number of reasons for this situation, including the effects of multi-competence, which remove any possibility that competence in more than one language can ever be identical to monolingual competence. With regard to the formal instructional setting, it points to many decades of research showing that, as critical period advocates acknowledge, in a normal schooling situation, adolescent beginners in the long run do as well as younger beginners. The article laments the profusion of definitions of what the critical period for language actually is and the generally piecemeal nature of research into this important area. In particular, it calls for a fuller integration of recent neurolinguistic perspectives into discussion of the age factor in second language acquisition research.

This study investigated possible gender bias on a vocabulary test, using a method suggested by Andrich and Hagquist to detect “real” differential item functioning (DIF). A total of 443 adult ESL learners completed all 228 items of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-IV). The 310 female and 133 male participants were assumed to be of equal competence, corresponding to levels B1 and B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Male participants outscored female participants, possibly due to the multiple-choice format and to the fact that most gender-biased questions favored men rather than women. Finally, our analysis process yielded only seven items out of 228 as showing gender DIF, which is much lower than the numbers reported in the literature for ESL tests. This low figure suggests that the high number of gender-related DIF items reported in previous research might be attributed to the use of DIF detecting methods that do not take into account artificial DIF stemming from the cross-contamination of test items.

Cognates are known to facilitate second language acquisition and use, as learners tend to assign to a new L2 word the meaning of a similar L1 word. Consequently, for L2 tests that rely largely on lexical items, performance may prove inflated for examinees whose L1 shares many cognates with the language being tested. This article examines the possibility of L1 bias on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), a well-established measure of receptive vocabulary knowledge in English. To investigate if performance on the PPVT is affected by cognates, we tested 293 speakers of French and 150 speakers of Polish, since those two languages differ markedly in the number of cognates they share with English. After demonstrating that both groups yield clearly distinct response patterns, descriptive and multivariate statistics confirmed that cognate items enhance test performance: the items with the highest score difference in favour of a language group overwhelmingly consist of cognates for that group only. Mantel-Haenszel and logistic regression show that items that are cognates for one of the two groups are more likely to show differential item functioning than the average items. The results suggest that scores on L2 vocabulary-based tests could be biased by the presence of cognates with the examinee’s first language.

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is universally perceived), or whether the correct use of articles is to some extent aided by the mechanisms that underlie the formulaic character of language. The study was conducted with 90 Polish upper-intermediate and advanced users of L2 English, who completed a test on article use, which made it possible to compare patterns of article use between contexts of different collocational strength (defined in terms of the frequency of occurrence in a corpus). The statistically higher success rates for article use in high-frequency collocations (with the grammatical “rule” being the same) indicate that phraseological aspects of language use may indeed play a role in what is usually perceived as the correct application of grammatical rules.

Researchers are frequently confronted with unanswered questions or items on their questionnaires and tests, due to factors such as item difficulty, lack of testing time, or participant distraction. This paper first presents results from a poll confirming previous claims (Rietveld & van Hout, 2006; Schafer & Gra- ham, 2002) that data replacement and deletion methods are common in research. Language researchers declared that when faced with missing answers of the yes/no type (that translate into zero or one in data tables), the three most common solutions they adopt are to exclude the participant’s data from the analyses, to leave the square empty, or to fill in with zero, as for an incorrect answer. This study then examines the impact on Cronbach’s α of five types of data insertion, using simulated and actual data with various numbers of participants and missing percentages. Our analyses indicate that the three most common methods we identified among language researchers are the ones with the greatest impact n Cronbach's α coefficients; in other words, they are the least desirable solutions to the missing data problem. On the basis of our results, we make recommendations for language researchers concerning the best way to deal with missing data. Given that none of the most common simple methods works properly, we suggest that the missing data be replaced either by the item’s mean or by the participants’ overall mean to provide a better, more accurate image of the instrument’s internal consistency.

Research in second language acquisition has paid little attention to preliterate children learning a language which is absent from their environment outside the language class. This study examines the acquisition of English words by 24 French-speaking children aged 35–59 months, who were introduced to 57 words, embedded in stories and songs. Four stories and four songs were randomly spread across four consecutive weekly workshops consisting of play-based pedagogical activities. The impact of the input source, number of encounters with each lexical item, animacy as a feature of the lexical items, and first language (L1) lexicon size was examined. Recall of target words was assessed through the selection between four images after hearing the word, and L1 lexicon was assessed through the Peabody test. Results show significantly higher recall for animate concepts, while no difference in recall was found in relation to input source (words in songs vs. stories) or L1 lexicon size. Results also stress the need for a possibly higher number of encounters than that normally found for adults in order to achieve significant recall