Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

To date, there has been mounting research evidence on the impact of written corrective feedback. In response to this, reviews have been conducted to condense either findings or methodologies through the combined analysis of EFL and ESL studies. Although syntheses shed light on the topic, no one provides exclusive insights into EFL realities.…

Using data of articles from 42 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-indexed journals of applied linguistics, this study renders a bibliometric analysis of the 2005--16 research trends in the eld. The analysis focuses on, among other issues, the most frequently discussed topics, the most highly cited publications, and the changes that have occurred…

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

For the past five years, the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository has been documenting intricacies of the Alutiiq language with the help of Elder speakers and a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1360839). The project's primary focus has been recording vocabulary, grammar, and ways of speaking for this threatened Native Alaskan…

Language proficiency is multi-componential in nature and, according to many SLA researchers and L2 practitioners, is best captured by the concepts of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Two of the three studies reported in this paper adopted the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2003) as the means to address the question of whether increasing…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

This article offers a methodological synthesis spanning 35 years of instructed second language acquisition research on the efficacy of form-focused instruction. Eighty-eight (quasi-) experimental studies were sampled from six academic journals: "Applied Linguistics," "Language Learning," "Language Teaching Research,"…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…

The purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (L2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. Several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of L2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that…

This meta-analysis offers a snapshot of thirty-five years (1980-2015) of research on instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). Fifty-four empirical studies involving a total of 5,051 second language learners -- sampled from six applied linguistics journals, "Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Language Teaching Research,"…

Language documentation and description are closely related practices, often performed as part of the same fieldwork project on an un(der)-studied language. Research trends in recent decades have seen a great volume of publishing in regards to the methods of language documentation, however, it is not clear that linguists' awareness of the…

Despite extensive theoretical and empirical research, we do not have estimations of the magnitude of sensitivity to grammatical information during L2 online processing. This is largely due to reliance on null hypothesis significance testing (Plonsky, 2015). The current meta-analysis draws on data from one elicitation technique, self-paced reading,…

This selective review of the second language acquisition and applied linguistics research literature on grammar learning and teaching falls into three categories: where research has had little impact (the non-interface position), modest impact (form-focused instruction), and where it potentially can have a large impact (reconceiving grammar).…

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…