In this study, we analyse a 9-year-old child's argumentative participation in a group discussion, from a microgenetic development angle. Specifically, we follow one child through the discussion and analyse the development process, defined as changed participation and as interactionally contingent upon the other participants and the teacher. The…

Teaching simulations such as scriptwriting tasks offer a novel way to support pre-service teachers in gaining diagnostic competencies and in guiding students to work through difficulties. We first report on the theory-driven development of a scriptwriting task, specifically the theoretically-founded language- and accompanying content-related…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

The present study investigated the effects of group set-up in a semester-long telecollaborative discussion forum project in second-semester German. In order to explore whether group set-up affects learning in discussion forums, small groups of non-native speakers (NNS) of German were partnered either with native speakers (NS), other NNS with the…

The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

Opportunities for language learners to access authentic input and engage in consequential interactions with native speakers of their target language abound in this era of computer mediated communication. Synchronous audio/video calling software represents one opportunity to access such input and address the challenges of developing pragmatic and…

National cultural distance is considered to be a strong predictor of language learners' pragmatic competence. To test the actual effect of national cultural distance on pragmatic competence holistically and comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence discretely, the current study was conducted on two groups of undergraduate…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…