Few studies provide information on the reliability and validity of parental report instruments when assessing the language skills of pre-school-aged children. This study investigates the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the parental report instrument, the Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory III (FinCDI III),…

This paper examined whether a younger starting age of formal instruction on a foreign language is beneficial in expanding circle countries. An experimental study was designed to examine to what extent the five varieties of English language teachers are intelligible to Japanese- (JSLs) and Korean-speaking language learners (KSLs), who have…

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Past experimental studies of corrective feedback (CF) have isolated factors like grammatical complexity, learner proficiency, and L1 one by one, carefully designing experiments that eliminate the influence of "extraneous" factors. Because each factor is actually codependent, more holistic study is needed. Eleven studies, all of which had…

This study examines the relationship between German second language (L2) learners' awareness of the German lexical stress assignment system and their ability to accurately assign stress to cognate words with predictable lexical stress. Participants were 31 adult L2 German learners from three groups: native English speakers with a range of German…

The present study examined second language (L2) development in the perceptual identification of a dialectal sound of the target language, through an investigation of the role of individual learner experiences in L2 phonological development. A total of 213 English-speaking learners of Spanish across five levels of study and with varying dialect…

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were…

Arabic stress is predictable, varies across words, and does not have a contrastive role, whereas, Hebrew stress although nonpredictable, carries contrastive value. Stress processing was assessed in speakers of the two languages at three processing levels: discrimination, short-term memory, and metalinguistic awareness. In Experiment 1, Arabic…

In addition to the examination of non-linguists' evaluations of different speech varieties, in recent years sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have afforded greater attention towards the ways in which naïve listeners perceive, process, and encode spoken language variation, including the identification of language varieties as regionally or…

Turkish students tend to make considerable stress placement errors when pronouncing English polysyllabic words because of the interference of the traditional word stress patterns of their mother tongue. They usually misplace stresses in their utterance, both either as a result of their native pronunciation habits or their lack of stress-placing…

The present study investigated a group of cognitive individual differences considered advantageous in second language learning and their role in language learning under implicit and explicit feedback conditions using both language awareness and language development measures. The study further investigated whether different types of awareness are…

This article reports an experiment on the implicit learning of second language stress regularities, and presents a methodological innovation on awareness measurement. After practising two-syllable Spanish words, native Cantonese speakers with English as a second language (L2) completed a judgement task. Critical items differed only in placement of…