While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

This study employed (and reports in detail) systematic procedures for research synthesis and meta-analysis to summarize findings from experimental and quasi-experimental investigations into the effectiveness of L2 instruction published between 1980 and 1998. Comparisons of average effect sizes from 49 unique sample studies reporting sufficient data indicated that focused L2 instruction results in large target-oriented gains, that explicit types of instruction are more effective than implicit types, and that Focus on Form and Focus on Forms interventions result in equivalent and large effects. Further findings suggest that the effectiveness of L2 instruction is durable and that the type of outcome measures used in individual studies likely affects the magnitude of observed instructional effectiveness. Generalizability of findings is limited because the L2 type-of-instruction domain has yet to engage in rigorous empirical operationalization and replication of its central research constructs. Changes in research practices are recommended to enhance the future accumulation of knowledge about the effectiveness of L2 instruction.

Effectiveness of L2 Instruction: A Research Synthesis and Quantitative Meta‐analysis

Learning Vocabulary in Another Language: Appendixes

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/28EB9167780446B105527FA06D996119/S0142716406060024a.pdf/div-class-title-grammatical-processing-in-language-learners-div.pdf

Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.

1. Word frequency and vocabulary size Paul Nation and Rob Waring 2. Variation in spoken and written language Michael McCarthy and Ron Carter 3. Vocabulary connections Rosamund Moon 4. Vocabulary and context William Nagy 5. Productive vs. receptive aspects of vocabulary Francine Melka 6. Models of lexical acquisition Paul Meara 7. Cognitive constraints on vocabulary acquisition Nick Ellis 8. Intralexical factors affecting the difficulty of vocabulary acquisition Batia Laufer 9. L1 influences on L2 vocabulary acquisition 10. Acquisition of the formal aspects of vocabulary Michael Swan 11. Vocabulary learning strategies Ann Ryan 12. Vocabulary and the syllabus Norbert Schmitt 13. Teaching vocabulary: most recent trends Felicity O'Dell 14. Vocabulary and testing John Read 15. Dictionaries, thesauruses, lexical resources Phil Schofield.

詞彙:描述、習得與教學=Vocabulary : description, acquisition and pedagogy

Bilingual speakers often code-switch from one language to another, especially when both languages are used in the environment. This article explores the potential theoretical explanations for this language behavior, the costs and benefits associated with language switching, and the role of language dominance in the direction of the switch. In short, code switching follows functional and grammatical principles and is a complex, rule-governed phenomenon. Although significant progress has been made in understanding the psycholinguistics of code switching, research is needed to examine the cognitive mechanisms underlying the bilingual's ability to integrate and separate two languages during the communicative process.

Bilingual Language Mixing: Why Do Bilinguals Code-Switch?:

Bimodal speech perception: an examination across languages

Information-Processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use

Methods in Bilingual Research. Connectionist Models of Second Language Processing and Bilingualism. Memory Representation in Sentence Processing. Psycholinguistic Theory and Research. Figurative Language Processing. Language Skill Development in Bilingual Children.

Bilingual sentence processing

tain associations pertaining to rela tionships or emotions involving objects, things, or persons, espe cially for a monolingual speaker of English. Now, consider this same concept in a bilingual setting. Does the concept of "love" carry infor mation regarding its translation equivalent of amor (e.g., the fact that in Spanish this concept is used primarily to show emotions to per sons, but not to animals or objects)? Early researchers addressed this question at a general level by pos ing that there are separate memory stores if the two languages are learned in different settings (e.g., home vs. school), but a common memory store if the languages are learned simultaneously in the same setting (Ervin & Osgood, 1954). Re cent research, however, has ad dressed this classic question by fo cusing more closely on how the bilingual's two languages are re lated in real time and what mecha nisms and processes are involved during word retrieval and lan guage processing. The purpose of this review is to consider some issues regarding how bilinguals organize their two languages in memory. My aim in this discussion is not to be exhaus tive; rather, the discussion is selec tive. I start by providing a brief discussion of current models of bi

Roberto R. Heredia

Papers

Bilingual Language Mixing: Why Do Bilinguals Code-Switch?:

Bimodal speech perception: an examination across languages

Information-Processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use

Bilingual sentence processing

Bilingual Memory and Hierarchical Models: A Case for Language Dominance