The distinctive features of the Arabic language and orthography offer opportunities to investigate multiple word characteristics at the item level. The aim of this paper was to model differences in word reading at the item level among 3rd grade native Arabic-speaking children (n = 303) using cross-classified generalized random-effects (CCGRE)…

This article reports on how increasing understanding of the morphology of science vocabulary, by introducing and using affixes, improved students' ability to recognise key words in examination questions and link these to prior knowledge. As a result, students attempted far more questions and the quality of answers they provided was significantly…

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The…

This study investigates the knowledge of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish regarding the production of object pronominal clitics (excluding non-reflexive third-person clitics), with a focus on: (i) their morphology, considering the variants that coexist for each form, and (ii) their syntactic placement (proclitic or enclitic) with respect…

An event-related potential experiment was conducted in order to investigate readers' response to violations in the hierarchical structure of functional categories in Japanese, an agglutinative language where functional heads like Negation (Neg) as well as Tense (Tns) are realized as suffixes. A left-lateralized negativity followed by a P600 was…

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for…

Purpose: This study tested children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., "Are the nice little dogs running?"). Data from children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were compared to previously published data from typically developing (TD) children…

Characterization of language in naturalistic settings in autism spectrum disorder has been lacking, particularly at young ages, but such information is important for parents, teachers, and clinicians to better support language development in real-world settings. Factors contributing to this lack of clarity include conflicting definitions of…

This study explores undergraduate college students' difficulties in translating English and Arabic plurals. Results of an English and Arabic plural translation test showed that cases where Arabic plurals match those of English in English were translated correctly. However, the students had difficulty translating the following: (i) Arabic plurals…

Research on the acquisition order of inflectional morphemes in English has shown that third-person singular "-s" (3SG"-s") is challenging to acquire and acquired later than "be" copula by both L1 and L2 learners of English. In a departure from the usual practice of controlled elicitation, the current study…

Native speakers of English have a strong preference for transferred negation as opposed to non-transferred negation. The present study aims to examine whether young Chinese-speaking ESL learners have a target-like preference for transferred negation and whether they have a system-wide representation of transferred negation in their early English…

The beneficial role of collaborative dialogue in second language (L2) writing has been established, with considerable research investigating the role that collaborative writing tasks play in facilitating language learning by promoting language-related episodes (LREs). However, when compared to that of commonly taught languages, research…

This study examines whether ten weeks of direct instruction of affixes with online systems can improve learners' knowledge of affixes by using Affix Master 10 (AM10), a collection of online self-study materials developed by the current researchers. The aim of AM10 is to let students comprehensively learn 30 prefixes and 31 suffixes. The two…

The purpose of morphology instruction is to: (1) support accurate and fluent polysyllabic (poly = more than one) reading; (2) improve spelling of polysyllabic words; and (3) aid vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Thus, instruction needs to move from part (morphemes) to whole (polysyllabic words). This guide includes information…

A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses "we" in academic writing to acknowledge one's stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun "we" is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the…