Purpose: The purpose of this study was to delineate differences between children with specific language impairment (SLI), typical age-matched (TAM) children, and typical younger (TY) children in learning and mastering an undisclosed artificial morphological rule (AMR) through exposure and usage. Method: Twenty-six participants (eight 10-year-old…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

This paper reports the results of a quasi-experimental effects-of-instruction study examining the efficacy of applying a Cognitive Linguistic (CL) approach to L2 learning of the semantics of English modals. In spite of their frequency in typical input, modal verbs present L2 learners with difficulties, party due to their inherent…

Considers previous research and data regarding the relative frequencies of a wide variety of lexical items expressing doubt and certainty in written and spoken corpuses and uses the data to evaluate the adequacy of some well-known English as a second language textbooks. (Author/CB)