This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

Background: Children's language abilities set the stage for their education, psychosocial development and life chances across the life course. Aims: To compare the efficacy of two preschool language interventions delivered with low dosages in early years settings (EYS): Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST) and an Adapted Derbyshire Language…

The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to investigate the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) framed within the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) on Thai learners' use of academic collocations and 2) to examine how Thai learners utilized the involvement load (IL) components (need, search, and evaluation) to master academic collocations. It is…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

College-level deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and hearing students of English as a Second Language (L2) along with hearing native speakers (NS) of English were assessed in their knowledge of English resultative and depictive sentences. In "Kevin wiped the table clean," the resultative phrase "clean" indicates that the…

Adults learning a new language tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than fluent speakers do; ratings on acceptable utterances, however, tend to align more closely with fluent speakers. This asymmetry raises a question as to whether unconventional utterances can be statistically preempted by conventional utterances for adult…

Purpose: We conducted a randomized control trial of an instructional program, SRSD Plus, which integrates reading for writing to inform, writing, oral language, spelling and handwriting for students in Grades 1 and 2. Method: A total of 10 teachers and their 248 students in Grade 1 (n = 121) and Grade 2 (n = 127) in the southwestern part of the US…

This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a…

Argumentation is a key skill in most school subjects and academic disciplines, including mathematics and science. It is possible that similarities and differences between how argumentation is expressed in different subjects can contribute to, or disrupt, students' transferrable argumentation skills. The purpose of this study is therefore to…