Simone Pfenninger

University of Zurich | UZH · Englisches Seminar

The aim of this study is to investigate both quantitatively and qualitatively the impact of career-related major life events (MLEs) on patterns of reported linguistic change across the lifespan, with an emphasis on how individual differences relate to differential patterns of MLE-related change. The occupational significant life events scrutinized...

The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect-speaking and standard-Ger...

This study is the first to explore microdevelopment in sociolinguistic evaluative judgments of standard German and Austro‐Bavarian dialect by adult second language learners of German by using dense time serial measurements. Intensive longitudinal data (10 observations per participant) were collected from four learners at approximately weekly interv...

The main goal of this paper is to suggest a combination of data analyses – notably generalized additive models, time-series clustering methodology, visual methods for significance testing and qualitative analyses – that relate to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). To this end, we report on findings from a larger project conducted in a bilingual...

This cross-sectional study addresses for the first time the non/linear association between individual learner differences of social, proficiency-related, and socioaffective nature (length of residence [LoR], varietal proficiency, exposure, and socioaffect) and differential outcomes in L2 sociolinguistic repertoires against the backdrop of the Austr...

Language fundamentally defines and distinguishes us as humans, as members of society, and as individuals. As we go through life, our relationship with language and with learning shifts and changes, but it remains significant. This book is an up-to-date resource for graduate students and researchers in second language (L2) acquisition who are intere...

This study is the first to investigate subject-level variability in sociolinguistic evaluative judgements by 30 adult L2 German learners and explore whether the observed variability is characterizable as a function of individual differences in proficiency, exposure, and motivation. Because group-level estimates did not paint an accurate picture of...

In this third decade of the 21st century, it is clear that the world’s citizens increasingly function in more than one language – and more and more individuals acquire more than one language from birth or in early childhood. What is more, language skills are essential to a child’s ability to communicate and develop. This chapter’s primary goal is t...

Rapid brain development is the basis for adolescents’ continuous general maturation, including physical, cognitive, and psychological changes. After an overview of brain and environmental changes that are related to pubertal maturation processes and their implications for language learning, we will look into the topic of dual language learners’ ach...

This longitudinal study with time-serial data examines for the first time whether different types of intraindividual variation in second language (L2) performance and cognitive functioning are related, and how and when they influence L2 development longitudinally in older adulthood. We analyzed the L2 development of 26 German-speaking adults aged 6...

Second language (L2) learning has been promoted as a promising intervention to stave off age-related cognitive decline. While previous studies based on mean trends showed inconclusive results, this study is the first to investigate nonlinear cognitive trajectories across a 30-week training period. German-speaking older participants (aged 64–75 year...

The present study investigates how reading fluency in German, and monolingual versus bilingual language background influence the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in primary school. Data of 83 monolingual and bilingual children with varying degrees of German reading skills (including children with dyslexia) were analyzed after they ha...

Psycholinguistics is a scientific discipline that focuses on the study of how humans learn and use language. This chapter illustrates how second language acquisition (SLA) research benefits from theories and methods that sit at the intersection of psychology and linguistics. A psychological approach to psycholinguistics involves the study of langua...

The question of cognition in second language (L2) acquisition later in life is of importance inasmuch as L2 learning is largely mediated by domain‐general cognitive capacities. While a number of these capacities have been shown to decline with age, individual differences in cognition increase over the lifespan. This microdevelopment study investiga...

The overall theme of this special issue is intra-individual variation, that is, the observable variation within individuals’ behaviour, which plays an important role in the humanities area as well as in the social sciences. While various fields have recognised the complexity and dynamism of human thought and behaviour, intra-individual variation ha...

This is the first longitudinal study to explore the best time and timing for regular versus bilingual language exposure in (pre)primary programs, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations, trends and interactions in individual data as well as intra-individual variation over time. We studied children who had received 50/50 bil...

In this study, I present dense, longitudinal data exploring the insights that a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) perspective can bring to bear on patterns of relationships found between learner individual differences – notably age of onset (AO) and extracurricular L2 English use – in children in (pre)primary programs in Switzerland. We studied...

en Previous research indicates that speakers of American English chiefly use crispy when referring to dry foods and crunchy when referring to wet foods, suggesting that these near‐synonyms have different semantic frames. The present study is the first to address how speakers of American English process crispy and crunchy by investigating whether fo...

This study reveals hitherto overlooked effects of age of onset (AO) in immersive school contexts, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations and trends in individual data. The second language (L2) English development was studied in 91 children who received 50–50 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) instruction in Ge...

Multiple modality is spread across the wider Atlantic region, both within individual varieties and across variety types. Based on corpus-based evidence, it is argued that first and second tiers of multiple modals carry high diagnostic value and that regionally separated Anglophone areas differ in their preference for first- and second-tier componen...

English in the German-Speaking World - edited by Raymond Hickey December 2019

Research over more than forty years has shown consistently that earlier L2 starters do not in the long term maintain the linguistic advantage of an early start over older starters. What, then, in the light of the widespread setting aside of the evidence regarding the apparent uselessness of an early start, is one to advise in respect of early L2 in...

While there is a growing body of research on second language acquisition (SLA) in children, adolescents, young and more mature adults, much remains to be explored about how adults in later life learn a new language and how good additional language learning is for them . Our goal in this article is to survey and evaluate what is known about the ling...

This article is concerned with age in second language learning. It steers well clear, however, of the well-worn issue of maturational constraints and the intractable problems of locating their consensual offset point and finding indisputable evidence for or against them. Instead we propose something completely different in our agenda for age-relate...

Despite contrary research findings, many laypeople still claim that starting second language (L2) instruction early yields linguistic advantages. This assertion is again undermined by a 5-year longitudinal study conducted in Switzerland testing the English language skills of 636 secondary-school students who had all learned Standard German and Fren...

While there is a growing body of research on second language acquisition in children and prime-of-life learners, much remains to be explored about how older adults learn a new language and how good additional language learning is for them (see e.g. Mackey & Sachs, 2012). In this study we present the findings of a longitudinal pilot study in which 1...

This article deals with some misunderstandings about the age factor in second language acquisition which result from a reliance on an incomplete interpretation of relevant research findings. It begins with an exploration of the work of Penfield and Lenneberg and goes on to weigh recent evidence for and against the hypothesis of a “critical period”...

In this case‐series study, quantitative and qualitative data were collected through an international web survey inviting (former) college aphasic students to describe their feelings of anxiousness, helplessness and self‐efficacy while using language when back at school, their self‐reported use of communication strategies, and the extent to which th...

The "love factor" has increasingly figured in SLA research. Thus, Piller (2002) studied the language "glue" between cross-lingual couples; Marinova-Todd (2003) found a link between L2 proficiency and co-habitation with native speakers; Muñoz and Singleton (2007) reported a romantic connection between successful late L2 learners and native speakers;...

While there is a growing body of research on second language acquisition (SLA) in children and younger adults, hardly anything is known about how the brain learns a new language at an advanced age. One of the reasons for this might be that the idea of “earlier = better” is still tenaciously upheld despite growing evidence from psycholinguistics and...

In this paper, we discuss the problem of articulation between levels in the educational system, as the transition from a rather more communicative, contentbased and holistic approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching at primary level to more formal and explicit ways of foreign language (FL) teaching at secondary is often experienced a...

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acqui...

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acqui...

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning...

The main goal of this paper is to analyze how the age factor behaves as an alleged individual difference (ID) variable in SLA by focusing on the influence that the learning context exerts on the dynamics of age of onset (AO). The results of several long-term classroom studies on age effects will be presented, in which I have empirically analyzed wh...

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning...

This edited volume provides an overview of current thinking and directions for further research in applied linguistics by bringing together in a single volume a range of perspectives regarding original research agendas and innovative methodological approaches. It focuses not only on the challenges that applied linguistics researchers have been faci...

In the course of reading development children become familiar with letter strings and learn to distinguish between lexical and non-lexical items. In previous studies, the N1 component of the ERP was shown to reflect print tuning but also to be sensitive to lexical effects. It remains unclear, however, whether these two aspects of orthographic proce...

In the current paper, we home in on the question as to how early and late learners of English as an L3 and L4 use new target language (TL) input to produce sentences by investigating the possible relationships among the reconstructive nature of some memory processes, age of onset (AO), and TL proficiency in terms of the effects that these factors h...

In this longitudinal study, undertaken in Switzerland between 2008 and 2015, we home in on the interaction of starting age for English with the role of knowledge of other languages (German and French) in an array of oral and written tasks. Using longitudinal data from the same student cohort (200 learners) over a period of five years has made it po...

In this study, I examine the strength of the association between L3 English performance and starting age, on the one hand, and motivation and different types of provision of foreign language teaching, on the other, in Swiss learners of EFL with a long learning experience (between 6–11 years). Multilevel analyses were performed to investigate whethe...

Recent findings (see, for example, Muñoz and Singleton, 2011) indicate that age of onset is not a strong determinant of instructed foreign language (FL) learners’ achievement and that age is intricately connected with social and psychological factors shaping the learner’s overall FL experience. The present study, accordingly, takes a participant-ac...

The longitudinal intervention study reported here is the first to investigate the efficiency of computer learning software specifically designed for dyslexic Swiss German learners of Standard German as a second language (L2) and English as a third language (L3). A total of 40 subjects (20 of them dyslexics and 20 of them nondyslexics; 10 students f...

This study examines the impact of L2 literacy on the development of writing proficiency in the L3, as related to age of onset (AO) of instruction, as well as the effects of AO on ultimate L3 attainment at the end of the period of normal schooling. Using longitudinal data for the same student cohort (200 Swiss learners of English) at the beginning a...

This study was designed to investigate the effects of age of onset and type of instruction on ultimate EFL attainment at the end of the period of normal schooling in Switzerland, measured in terms of written fluency, complexity, morphosyntac-tic accuracy, vocabulary size, and listening skills. Data were gathered from four groups of 18-year-old Swis...

This study investigates the interrelation of motivation, autonomy, metacognition, and L3 gains made as a function of three months of intervention with computer software specifically designed for the private use of dyslexic Swiss German learners of Standard German as a second language (L2) and English as a third language (L3). Based on questionnaire...

This paper analyses the use of periphrastic do in negative declaratives and non-negative questions with inversion by 200 Swiss and 30 German middle-school students of the same age but with different onsets of learning English and consequently a different amount of foreign language instructions. Do-support shows evidence of a variety of influences o...

This study examines evidence for the hypothesis (e.g., Munoz, 2006) that an early starting age is not necessarily more beneficial to the successful learning of L2 inflectional morphology in strictly formal instructional settings. The present author investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the production and reception of 5 select...