Purpose: Identification of children with specific language impairment (SLI) can be difficult even though their language can lag that of age peers throughout childhood. A clinical grammar marker featuring tense marking in simple clauses is valid and reliable for young children but is limited by ceiling effects around the age of 8 years. This study…

Morphological knowledge refers to an individual's understanding of the structure and meaning of words based on their familiarity with morphemes (i.e., word parts, including prefixes, suffixes, and bases). This knowledge is crucial to developing various aspects of language and literacy to successfully function in 21st century education and…

This study aimed to explore the language difficulties faced by English diploma students and provide solutions to overcome them. The data collected in the form of a questionnaire administered to 39 female students were compared in percentages for closed-ended questions and thematically for open-ended ones. Results showed that diploma students…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language…

Purpose: This follow-up study examined whether a parent intervention that increased the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parent input and accelerated children's sentence diversity (Hadley et al., 2017) had indirect benefits on tense/agreement (T/A) morphemes in parent input and children's spontaneous speech. Method: Differences in…

Adult Basic Education programs are under pressure to develop and deliver instruction that promotes rapid and sustained literacy development. We describe a novel approach to a literacy intervention that focuses on morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units contained in words. We argue that if you teach learners that big words are comprised…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…

The study aimed, firstly, to assess a group of Indonesian adult EFL students' mastery of tenses and aspects as part of their mastery of English grammar and, secondly, to identify if their experience of going through the instructional processes, their perceptions of and habits in studying English grammar shaped their mastery of tenses and aspects.…

This investigation examined two techniques that may help learners focus on second language (L2) constructions when recasts are provided during meaning-based communicative activities: altering the cognitive complexity of tasks and manipulating the input frequency distributions of target constructions. We first independently assessed the validity of…

The study examines the effect of explicit form focus instruction and specifically metalinguistic information feedback on the development of both implicit and explicit knowledge of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Ninety-one subjects at the lower intermediate level were carefully selected through placement test at one of the…

This comparative, classroom-based study investigated the effect and effectiveness of introducing a focus on form approach to a content-based, occupation-specific language program for adults. Thirty-six adults in two classes participated in a 10-week study. One group of 16 adults received content-based instruction that included a focus on form…

Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether young French-learning children (N = 76) are able to use a single number cue in subject-verb agreement contexts and match a visually dynamic scene with a corresponding verbal stimulus. Results from both preferential looking and pointing demonstrated significant comprehension in…

The purpose of this research was to examine whether adults rely on morphemic spelling rules or word-specific knowledge when spelling simple words. We examined adults' knowledge of two of the simplest and most reliable rules in English spelling concerning the morphological word ending -s. This spelling is required for regular plural nouns (e.g.,…