The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

Using a large sample of longitudinal assessment data from children in publicly funded infant/toddler care, preschool, and kindergarten (analytic N = 453,468), this study modeled language and literacy trajectories from early infancy through kindergarten for dual language learners (DLLs) from homes representing many different languages and their…

We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (Ln) in speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 adult immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands for study or work. Performance for all four language skills turned out to decline monotonically after an age of…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

To date, research into conference interpreting has not produced a definition of the concrete subskills associated with an A, B and C language in interpreters' combinations of working languages. Existing frameworks for performance assessment in foreign languages are not designed to cover the very advanced range of language mastery associated with…

The 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) involved 57 countries and 43 different languages to assess students' achievement in mathematics and science. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether items and test scores are affected as the differences between language families and cultures increase. Using…

Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined…

Many people speak more than two languages. How do languages acquired earlier affect the learnability of additional languages? We show that linguistic distances between speakers' first (L1) and second (L2) languages and their third (L3) language play a role. Larger distances from the L1 to the L3 and from the L2 to the L3 correlate with lower…

This article examines the effect of phonological context (singleton vs. clustered consonants) on full phoneme segmentation in Hebrew first language (L1) and in English second language (L2) among typically reading adults (TR) and adults with reading disability (RD) (n = 30 per group), using quantitative analysis and a fine-grained analysis of…

This quantitative study focuses on the relationship between foreign language learners' aptitude and proficiency test scores. Four groups of 136 beginning students received six months of Initial Acquisition Training (IAT) in four different language categories, according to the level of complexity for an English speaker: French (Category I),…

Applied linguistics may benefit from a morphological complexity measure to get a better grip on language learning problems and to better understand what kind of typological differences between languages are more important than others in facilitating or impeding adult learning of an additional language. Using speaking proficiency scores of 9,000…

Azerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian…

Purpose: This study explored a technological contribution to education made by the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in the formative assessment field. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to identify the relationship between online formative (Online Diagnostic Assessment; ODA) and summative (Defense…

This study examines the writing skills of students in grades 1 to 5 of an Italian-English two-way immersion program. Narrative writing samples were collected in both languages and scored for content, organization, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, text length, and overall total score. The results show that writing skills improved as a function of…

Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to determine whether a combination of English-language measures and a parent questionnaire on first-language development could adequately discriminate between English-language learners (ELLs) with and without language impairment (LI) when children had diverse first-language backgrounds. Method:…