Input and Second Language Acquisition: The Roles of Frequency, Form, and Function Introduction to the Special Issue

The articles in this special issue explore how the acquisition of linguistic constructions as form-function mappings is affected by the distribution and saliency of forms in oral input, by their functional interpretations, and by the reliabilities of their form-function mappings. They consider the psycholinguistics of language learning following general cognitive principles of category learning, with schematic constructions emerging from usage. They analyze how learning is driven by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within construction, the salience of their form, the significance of their functional interpretation, the match of their meaning to the construction prototype, and the reliability of their mappings. These investigations address a range of morphological and syntactic constructions in instructed, uninstructed, and laboratory settings. They include both experimental and corpus-based approaches (some conducted longitudinally) and consider the relationship between input and acquisition in the short term and over time, with a particular emphasis on spoken input directed to second and foreign language learners.