The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition offers a systematic and accessible overview of the main psychological areas and theories in order to keep abreast of the ongoing paradigm shift. Readers will find succinct and up-to-date descriptions of a wide range of psycholinguistic and neuropsychological topics such as language and the brain; neuroimaging and other research methods in psycholinguistics and brain research; non-nativist approaches to language acquisition; explicit/implicit learning and memory, procedural/declarative knowledge, and the automatization of language skills; learner characteristics, age effects, and the critical period hypothesis; and the psychological basis of language learning in educational contexts.
1. Introduction: Mapping the terrain
2. Language and the brain
3. Psychological Processes in Language Acquistion I: symbolic versus Connectionist Accounts
4. Psychological Processes in Language Acquistion II: Explicit Versus Implicit Learning
5. The Learner in the Language Learning Process I: The Dynamic interplay of Learner Characteristics and the Learning environment
6. The Learner in the Language Learning Process II: The Learner's age and The Critical Period Hypothesis
7. The Psychology of Instructed Second Language Acquisition