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Cognition is not just 'in the head'; it extends well beyond the skull and the skin. Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science views cognition as being embodied, environmentally embedded, enacted, encultured, and socially distributed. The Douglas Fir Group (2016) likewise recognizes languages as emergent, social, integrated phenomena. Language is the quintessence of distributed cognition. Language cognition is shared across naturally occurring, culturally constituted, communicative activities. Usage affects learning and it affects languages, too. These are essential components of a theory of language cognition. This article summarizes these developments within cognitive science before considering implications for language research and teaching, especially as these concern usage-based language learning and cognition in second language and multilingual contexts. Here, I prioritize research involving corpus-, computational-, and psycho-linguistics, and cognitive psychological, complex adaptive system, and network science investigations of learner-language interactions. But there are many other implications. Looking at languages through any one single lens does not do the phenomena justice. Taking the social turn does not entail restricting our research focus to the social. Nor does it obviate more traditional approaches to second language acquisition. Instead it calls for greater transdisciplinarity, diversity, and collaborative work.

This study investigates how visual context influences second language (L2) long-term structural priming for the Chinese ba construction. The experiment consisted of a baseline phase, an exposure phase, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. L2 Chinese learners (N = 120) were assigned to 1 of 4 groups for the exposure manipulation. The 3 experimental groups were exposed to simultaneous text and audio stimuli using the ba construction, accompanied by different visual contexts: a TV episode for the video group, isolated pictures for the picture group, and no nonlinguistic context for the text group. The picture and the video groups showed a greater increase in production of the ba construction from the baseline to the immediate posttest than the text group, but only the video group continued producing higher rates of the ba construction in the delayed posttest after a 3-day interval. The production of the ba construction remained unchanged for the control group throughout the experiment. We conclude that visual context enhances L2 structural priming and that the continuous video context can support long-term priming effects. This is the first study to directly compare the magnitude of L2 long-term structural priming in different visual contexts, shedding light on the mechanism by which context facilitates L2 learning.

This study investigates gender assignment and agreement accuracy in the written productions of French-speaking learners of Spanish across three proficiency levels. Drawing on a medium-scale learner corpus, we coded all noun phrases for gender assignment (based on determiner inflection), for noun-adjective agreement, and for determiner-adjective agreement, and we examined the impact of various linguistic and learner-related predictors using Bayesian mixed-effects models. Although the overall error rate was relatively low, likely due to task type and familiar vocabulary, the models revealed robust effects of proficiency level and of underlying grammatical and lexical factors. Regarding gender assignment, accuracy was significantly lower for nouns with non-prototypical or ambiguous gender markers, for feminine nouns, and when Spanish and French differed in grammatical gender. Moreover, lower accuracy was observed with certain types of determiners. Noun-adjective agreement was influenced by the same factors, except for non-prototypical gender markings, which did not have a significant effect. In addition, less accuracy was observed with prenominal adjectives. Determiner–adjective agreement, in turn, only showed lower accuracy with feminine nouns, but the results of the statistical model should be interpreted with caution, due to high Pareto k values. Nevertheless, descriptive data confirm the relevance of distinguishing between noun–adjective and determiner–adjective agreement and highlight the need for larger corpora with a greater number of errors to model this phenomenon more conclusively. Overall, these findings contribute to a better understanding of gender processing in L2, demonstrate the value of medium-sized corpus analysis in second language acquisition research, and lay the groundwork for future research exploring crosslinguistic combinations beyond Spanish and French.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

Russian case morphology is recognized as a persistent challenge to second (L2) and heritage language (HL) speakers of Russian by researchers and practitioners alike. However, little classroom-based and pedagogy-oriented literature exists on the matter. In this paper, we address this research gap. First, we present a review of the literature that attempts to explain the challenging nature of mastering Russian grammatical cases from the cognitive linguistic, structural, and psycholinguistic perspectives. We then describe the general approaches to teaching and learning Russian cases found in the most commonly used Russian language textbooks in the United States. Finally, we discuss a pedagogical approach to the teaching and learning of Russian cases based on the principle of usage-based linguistics. Using sample materials designed for teaching the accusative case based on these principles, we illustrate the approach and discuss its potential benefits in helping learners build a more systematic conceptual knowledge base and develop greater automatization of functional control over grammatical case.

While English is a language that is commonly spoken among youth in Estonia, the prevalence of Japanese has also been increasing in the recent years, with the rising popularity of Japanese media, as well as different local opportunities to learn the language. I draw from Muysken’s probabilistic model for variation in mixing patterns and I suggest that in the case of Japanese, that is spoken only by a minority of Estonians with interspersed micro-communities, interpersonal awareness seems to be an underlying factor in the self-moderation of code-switching. I am using the Estonian-English-Japanese Facebook communication dataset that consists of synchronous private Facebook messages between 2015 and 2021: a total of 54 conversations and 16,743 tokens. There are 7 informants, four of whom are present in more than one conversation pair, which enables an analysis of the characteristics of their speech patterns that vary according to their interlocutor. The data suggest that interpersonal awareness can be both an enabling and inhibiting factor in both the prevalence of code-switching in general, and also the style of code-switching (e. g. insertional or alternational), dependent on the speaker’s interpretation of their interlocutor’s language dominance, proficiency, attitudes and sociocultural norms, as well as a way to show solidarity.

Children’s early grammatical constructions, e.g., SVO, exhibit a learning curve with cumulative verb types (CVT) increasing exponentially. According to Ninio (2006), the fact that learning curves, though nonlinear, can be modelled by a continuous regression suggests instant generalisation. Moreover, differences in initial verbs across children indicate minimal involvement of semantics. This study tested these claims on the Spanish “se” constructions (SSCs) in two children, Juan and Lucía (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015). Ninio’s findings were replicated. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses indicated that curves are driven by the temporal distribution of tokens (instances of the SSC irrespective of verb type) and therefore may reflect non-productivity-related mechanisms, e.g., retrieval-based learning. Furthermore, hapax verbs were relatively late to emerge in the children’s data, suggesting emergent generalisation. Analyses of raw lexical frequencies indicated relative semantic homogeneity across the two children’s verb types, suggesting a semantic prototype. Nonetheless, ecological factors may also explain these lexical similarities.

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form-function mapping frequency and the number of functions a modal signifies, using innovative methodological controls for other aspects of the input (e.g., form frequency) and child characteristics (e.g., age as a proxy for socio-cognitive development). The children were more likely to produce the frequent modals and form-function mappings of their input but modals with fewer functions in caregiver speech did not promote acquisition of these forms. Our findings support usage-based approaches to language acquisition and demonstrate the importance of applying appropriate controls when investigating relationships between input and development.

The late-acquired French subjunctive–indicative contrast conveys important information about event realization and is characterized by bound morphology, form ambiguity, contextual restrictedness, and the infrequency of the subjunctive. This study contributes underrepresented adverbial-clause interpretation data and incorporates lexical effects to extend what is known about why French mood is late-acquired. We assess interpretation of four adverbial conjunctions which primarily co-occur with subjunctive or indicative mood in corpus searches. Analysis of 77 participants revealed a statistically significant interaction between mood and proficiency, with more proficient learners affected by mood, whereas clause order influenced less proficient learners. Moreover, lower-proficiency learners treated adverbs within a particular class of co-occurrence more similarly across the 32 items than our advanced learners or native speakers, who were sensitive to lexical effects, attributable to the roles of frequency and semantics. The study contributes to the growing body of research on late-acquired structures, for which learners attend to evolving cues across acquisitional trajectories.

Recent research on second language (L2) writing has increasingly emphasized syntactic complexity as a key indicator of L2 writing proficiency. From an emergentist usage-based view, drawing on data from the B-JAS corpus, the study conducted both a longitudinal comparison across proficiency levels and a cross-sectional comparison between advanced learners and native speakers to investigate the features and development trends of syntactic complexity in L2 Japanese writing. Two indices were employed to measure syntactic complexity: the clause ratio (a large-grained index) and the ratio of different types of subordinate clauses (a fine-grained index). The results showed that learners had a higher clause ratio and greater use of te-form clauses at the advanced level than at the intermediate level. However, their use of relative clauses was lower, and their use of te-form clauses was significantly higher than that of native speakers. These findings reveal a syntactic usage tendency among learners, marked by an underuse of relative clauses and an overuse of te-form clauses. From a usage-based perspective, attentional biases from Chinese, frequency-based entrenchment, and the semantic ambiguity of te-form structures may primarily drive the observed syntactic usage patterns.