“Because It Sounds Right”: A Guiding Light of Speaker Knowledge

Approaches to second language teaching have included continuous exposure, grammar lessons, and a various combinations of these methods. Recent studies highlight specific, detailed knowledge, in speakers of a language, of the phonetic and structural information of many kinds of phrases. These include formulaic expressions (idioms, proverbs, conversational speech formulas, expletives), lexical bundles (sentence stems, conventional expressions, discourse organizers), and collocations (a range of other unitary, multiword expressions). These exemplars share the feature of familiarity: they are known and recognized by speakers of a language, and stored in mental representation with their concomitant features of structure, phonetic and prosodic shape, meaning, and use. In addition, the linguistic sciences currently advance the perspective that language competence is constituted by knowledge of constructions at various levels of abstraction, implying a larger role of memory in language competence than previously understood. Performance by persons with neurological disorders reveals specific effects on production of these kinds of phrases. Given the putatively extremely large repertory of known, stored expressions and constructions that have been shown to constitute language representation, a guiding principle of speaker use might be that the expression sounds right, implying special importance to listening exercises in second language learning

Effects of Age of Arrival on Acquisition of Formulaic Expressions in the Second Language

Little is known about age effects on formulaic language acquisition in second language (L2) learners. This research compared use and comprehension of formulaic expressions (FEs) in English and Russian by two groups of Russian bilingual speakers differing in age of arrival (AoA) to the USA. A critical period perspective predicts better performance in the early than the later group in the second language. Contrary to this expectation, the early arriving group did not perform significantly better than the later arriving group on the English formulaic tasks. They did perform better on the English than the Russian formulaic tasks. The later arriving group scored significantly higher than the early group on all formulaic tasks in Russian, and performed significantly better in Russian than English. Both bilingual groups scored higher on comprehension than production for English. The surprising result, that earlier arrival in the second language country did not significantly benefit formulaic language use, remains to be explained. Linguistic input and brain maturation likely both play important roles in formulaic language acquisition

Preservation of Familiar Speaker Recognition but not Unfamiliar Speaker Discrimination in Aphasic Patients

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Preferential Representation of Personal Names in the Right Hemisphere

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Brain Glucose Metabolism in Aphasia: A Model of the Interrelationship of Frontal Lobe Regions on Fluency

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Broca's Aphasia: Comparison to Metabolically Matched Aphasic Subjects

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Syntactic Facility in Fluent Aphasia

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