In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of context-dependency of seductive details on recall and transfer in multimedia learning environments. Seductive details were interesting yet irrelevant sentences in the instructional text. Two experiments were conducted. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to identify context-dependent and…

Situated within second language (L2) research about the acquisition of morphosyntax, this study investigated English L2 speakers' detection and primed production of a novel construction with morphological and structural features. We report on two experiments with Thai (n = 69) and Farsi (n = 70) English L2 speakers, respectively, carried out an…

This dissertation examines Spanish Direct Object clitic pronouns in Argentine spoken Spanish of adults and children (ages 4;0-7;0). It concentrates on (Finite verb + Nonfinite verb) constructions that allow both pre-verbal (Proclisis) and a postverbal (Enclisis) clitic placement. Previous corpus studies have shown that lexical (finite verb),…

Why do children from some minority groups and children living in poverty do poorly in school when compared to white middle-class children? Researchers have offered a large number of different answers to this question. One of the most popular answers has been based on the notion of "decontextualized language." This article argues that…

Because language provides the framework through which knowledge is constructed, it is crucial to consider the ways in which students with limited English proficiencies are able to express their understanding. English language learners (ELLs) make up a significant portion of the student body in the education system and represent many ethnic and…

For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…

Learning new words involves decoding both how a word fits the current situation and how it could be used in new situations. Three studies explore how two types of cues--sentence structure and the availability of multiple instances--affect children's extensions of nouns and verbs. In each study, 2.5-year-olds heard nouns, verbs, or no new word…

This study is aimed at describing the levels of code switching on EFL students' daily conversation. The topic is chosen due to the facts that code switching phenomenon are commonly found in daily speech of Indonesian community such as in teenager talks, television serial dialogues and mass media. Therefore, qualitative data were collected by using…

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation…

Processing morphemic elements is one of the most difficult parts of second language acquisition (DeKeyser, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2010). This difficulty gains prominence when second language (L2) learners must perform under time pressure, and difficulties arise in using grammatical knowledge. To solve the problem, the current study used the tenets…

Standards for literacy in the twenty-first century raise the bar on the complexity of texts and the tasks for which they are used. The strengths and limitations of contemporary approaches to text complexity are discussed with respect to major points raised in the six articles in this special issue. In addition, four features of text that are of…

This dissertation is concerned with the specific relationship between copular sentences and existential sentences, and what about that relationship is responsible for the well-known restrictions on definiteness and predicates that are observed in the existential cases. Instead of starting with the well-known paradigms which illustrate restrictions…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

When making requests, speakers need to select from a range of alternative forms available to them. In a corpus of naturally occurring Italian interaction, the two most common formats chosen are imperatives and interrogative constructions that include a turn-initial dative pronoun "mi" "to/for me", which is referred to as the "Mi X"? format in this…