Many children in bilingual regions follow lessons in a language at school (school-language) that they hardly ever speak at home or in other informal settings. What are the neural effects of this phenomenon? This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigates the effects of using school-language on brain activity during a high…

This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of think aloud protocols (TAPs) as an approach for examining and confirming sources of differential item functioning (DIF). The TAPs are used to investigate to what extent surface characteristics of the items that are identified by expert reviews as sources of DIF are supported by empirical evidence…

According to the most widely accepted Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model of intelligence measurement, each subtest score of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults (3rd ed.; WAIS-III) should reflect both 1st- and 2nd-order factors (i.e., 4 or 5 broad abilities and 1 general factor). To disentangle the contribution of each factor, we applied a…

Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how brains with and without language compute numbers. Measuring young children's verbal reactions in France (Paris) and in England (Oxford), here we show that, although there is a general arithmetic ability for small numbers that is shared by monkeys and preverbal infants, the development of such…

High school students enrolled in a French course learned vocabulary words under conditions of either massed or distributed practice. Though performance of the two groups was virtually identical immediately after completion of the study, the students who had learned the vocabulary by distributed practice did substantially better on a second test…

An approach to teaching grammar concepts treats conceptualization as a process of sensitization, consisting of three stages: motivating the student to learn the concept, presenting the operating concept and the grammatical category in question, and consolidating and enriching the concept in the student's mind. (MSE)

Two major currents of reflection on education exist in the Francophone world. The first, "didactique"--didactics--relates to teacher planning, working chiefly from considerations about the pupil's cognitive characteristics. The second, "pedagogie"--pedagogy--relates to the features of pedagogical reflection-in-action. The…

A discussion of the use of songs to teach French as a second language focuses on the value of songs in teaching aspects of pronunciation. An introductory section describes the benefits of songs as instructional material, particularly to impart cultural information about Quebec to Canadian anglophones. Three sections outline justifications for the…

Explores what it means to think in a target language, discusses those factors determining planned and unplanned use of more than one language for thinking, considers the role of target-language thinking in improving language ability, and examines mental translation in the reading of intermediate college French. The article concludes that benefits…

The research reported here focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis: relexification; reanalysis; dialect levelling; and parameter setting. The role of these processes in creole genesis is documented in a detailed comparison of Haitian Creole with two of its major source languages: French, its main lexifier language, and…