Examines why children have difficulty with homonymy. Two experiments were conducted. Children, ages 3 and 4 years, had to select or judge another person's selection of a different object with the same name, avoiding identical objects and misnomers. Older children were successful, but younger children failed these tasks. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences and to correct the grammatically-deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subject's performance in both judgment and revision tasks. (Author/VWL)

This article explores young children's facility in phonological awareness tasks requiring either the detection or the articulation of head, coda, onset, and rime subsyllabic units shared in word pairs. Data are reported from 70 nonreading children and 21 precocious readers attending preschools. Prereading children were able to articulate shared…

Previous research has shown that individual differences in working memory (WM) are highly predictive of a wide range of cognitive behaviours. Until recently, research has focused on monolingual, or undifferentiated, populations. The present research compares metacognitive awareness, as measured by self-ratings of reading, writing, speaking and…

A metalinguistic deficit in the awareness of phonological aspects of spoken language has long been assumed to be the single most important cause of reading failure among developmental dyslexics. Majority of this proposal's empirical support has come from examination of reading problems in irregular language like English and it's relation to the…

Different theories of second language acquisition offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. Examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners "his/her" in English. Learners' oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to…

Offers immersion classroom data focusing on the use of collaborative tasks related to the content to be learned that draw learners attention to formal properties of French. Such tasks provide both oral practice and lead to more accurate language use. (Author/VWL)

Discusses development of a battery of tasks that were used to assess phonological processing skills in Panjabi-English bilingual children in West Birmingham, United Kingdom. Results support the notion that at least some tasks of phonological awareness may be language specific. (Author/VWL)

Presents an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, and concepts about print in three-year-old children. Forty-three normally developing children were given 4 tests of language development: 12 metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and…

This empirical investigation compares the ability of adult multilingual learners of English to perform a metalinguistic task involving paying close attention to meaning and/or form in target utterances/sentences varying in semantic appropriateness and grammatical correctness. In a listening task, adult multilingual learners of English heard these…

Examines word awareness in 4-year-old children, comparing bilinguals and second language learners with monolingual children. The study controlled for many methodological problems, including the possibility of enhanced word awareness due to early reading. Results indicate that experience with a second language does not promote word awareness at…

The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., "city"-"grass"). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for…

Studies the collaborative output of students engaged in grammar dictation tasks in a British English-as-a-foreign-language context. Investigated the effect of pre-task focus on form work on task output processes. Focus is on how the framework of Language Related Episodes used by other researchers was refined to analyze second language output…

This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the effectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level had any impact on the students'…

This study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. Kindergarten and second-grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. Results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to…