Morphological awareness, or sensitivity to units of meaning, is an essential component of reading comprehension development. Current neurobiological models of reading and dyslexia have largely been built upon phonological processing models, yet reading for meaning is as essential as reading for sound. To fill this gap, the present study explores…

Word learning in a second language (L2) is a complex process, which is affected by learner-related (e.g., morphological awareness) and language-related (e.g., word semantic transparency) factors. Morphological awareness is learners' sensitivity to the morphological structure of printed words, and semantic transparency is the degree to which…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

This article reports on a study whose aim was to analyze the relation between the level of declarative purism and the preference for a particular loanword adaptation technique. Evidence from many languages shows that language purists accept foreign words more readily if they are in a native disguise; as a consequence, they choose adaptation…

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is well known for providing authentic opportunities for second and foreign language (L2) skill development. However, for many learners the use of traditional grammar within TBLT lacks the functional support necessary to create accurate and fluent L2 output. The current study replaced traditional grammar…

Good and poor comprehenders exhibit different profiles of cognitive abilities, despite comparable decoding skills. Recent work suggests that executive functions, particularly cognitive flexibility, may underlie poor comprehenders' difficulties in childhood and adulthood. However, metalinguistic skills that enable readers to reflect on various…

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to "all") in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical…

This two-year longitudinal study examined the role of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English among a group of first, second, and third generation immigrant Spanish-English bilingual children. Starting from a theoretical perspective on linguistic interdependence that takes into account linguistic constructs and their measurement,…

This current study aimed to investigate the influence of derivational and inflectional morphological awareness on the writing of undergraduate students studying English as a Foreign Language. They were divided in to two groups and each group comprised 200 advanced EFL learners. Explicit morphological instructions were given to group two in the…

Successful anaphor comprehension in reading is related to the explicitness of the antecedent--anaphor relation. It mirrors one of the purposes of textual enhancement (TE), which is that it raises learners' awareness of linguistic forms by enhancing the salience of input. Therefore, learners notice the enhanced form and discover the rule or…

Recent research has demonstrated that L2 learners and heritage speakers might have two different profiles in terms of their syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical-semantic knowledge of a target language (Montrul, 2004, 2006, 2010; Montrul, Foote, & Perpinan, 2008). However, the most influential of the major studies have been limited to…

Associating a content word to its rational semantic relations is regarded as a language learning strategy which explicitly contributes to mental lexicon. Semantic mapping herein seems to constitute an efficacious pattern for its practice in language instruction. Conversely, it appears to be among the least frequently used vocabulary learning…

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of…

This article summarizes the evidence as regards the effectiveness of therapy for grammar for school-aged children with language impairments. I first review studies focusing on specific areas of grammar (both expressive and receptive targets) and then studies aiming to improve language more generally, several of which focus more on the…

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic…