The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of…

The current paper attempts to account for the formation of English middle sentences. Discussing a set of previous analyses on the construction under investigation we show, following the assumptions of Oosten(1986) and Iwata(1999), that English middle constructions should be divided into two types: generic middle constructions and non-generic…

This article reports a small-scale study that investigated the effect of (1) an instructional method, viz. directing learners' attention to formulaic sequences (FS) in a text, and (2) typographic salience, i.e. bold typeface and underlined, on foreign-language (FL) learners' recall of FS and single words (SW). Twenty-eight FL learners read a…

Many students who are nonnative speakers of English, yet highly proficient, are placed into basic writing or English as a Second Language courses when they enter college. While these students may have advanced oral English proficiency, their writing frequently suffers from a lack of training in academic writing and commonly contains fragments and…

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

The relevance of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to the "real world" of college writing is an ongoing issue for those who teach ESL. Ideally, ESL composition classes should help students make connections between what they learn about writing and the ways they might need to write later on in their academic careers. Unfortunately, as with…

There is an increasing sensitivity to the challenges posed by the language of examination papers and of instruction in scientific subjects, especially for non-native speakers of English. It has been observed that in addition to technical subject-specific vocabulary, non-technical words such as instructional verbs have been sources of difficulty,…

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and…

We examined priming of adjective-noun structures in Dutch hearing and deaf children. In three experiments, hearing 7- and 8-year-olds, hearing 11- and 12-year-olds, and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds read a prenominal structure (e.g., "the blue ball"), a relative clause structure (e.g., "the ball that is blue"), or a main clause…

Semantically reversible sentences are prone to misinterpretation and take longer for typically developing children and adults to comprehend; they are also particularly problematic for those with language difficulties such as aphasia or Specific Language Impairment. In our study, we used fMRI to compare the processing of semantically reversible and…

Purpose: To examine lexical knowledge in children through a fast mapping task. Method: This study compared the performance of 60 African American English-speaking and general American English-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years. They were presented with a comprehension task involving the fast mapping of novel verbs in 4 different…

Children use syntax as well as observations of events to learn verb meanings. This is known as syntactic bootstrapping. This dissertation investigated the origins and mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping. Prior evidence suggested that two-year-olds, but not younger children, could use aspects of sentence structure to assign different…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of three computerized interventions on the reading skills of children with reading disabilities in Grade 2. This longitudinal intervention study included five test sessions over 1 year. Two test points occur before the intervention, and three afterwards. The last follow-up was conducted 1…

Previous accounts of preverbal subjects in Spanish and European Portuguese (EP) in the literature have debated the syntactic position of these elements. According to some analyses, preverbal subjects are canonical arguments appearing in an A-position (e.g. Goodall 2001, 2002; Suner 2003 for Spanish; Duarte 1997; Costa 2004 for EP). Other analyses…

Proponents of Processing Instruction (VanPatten, 2005) claim that learners benefit most when presented with both referential and affective structured input activities. Following a classic pretest-posttest design, the present study investigates the role of these two types of activities on the learning of the Spanish subjunctive. Groups differed…