In view of the ubiquitous increase in the use of C-tests, which are almost unanimously believed to measure general language proficiency, this study investigates whether the aspects of language proficiency tapped into by the C-test format are the same when the test is taken by a learner population other than that of foreign language learners.…

Internal error monitoring as reflected by the error-related negativity (ERN) component can give insight into the process of learning a second language (L2). Yet, early stages of learning are characterized by high levels of uncertainty, which obscures the process of error detection. We examine how uncertainty about L2 syntactic representations,…

From a constructivist perspective on learning, mistakes are seen as natural elements of learning processes. A supportive and constructive way of dealing with student mistakes has shown to affect students' individual motivation and learning performances in a favorable way. In classroom settings, however, making mistakes is not just a personal but…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

When judging subject-specific aspects of students' texts, teachers should assess various characteristics, e.g., spelling and content, independently of one another since these characteristics are indicators of different skills. Independent judgments enable teachers to adapt their classroom instruction according to students' skills. It is still…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

This article reports an eye-tracking study on the native and non-native processing of case in Spanish. Twenty-four native and 27 first language (L1) German non-native speakers of Spanish were tested on their sensitivity to case marking violations involving structural case with objects of ditransitive verbs and to violations of inherent case for…

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a…

Two studies investigated the effects of errors in German business letters written by Dutch students. Gaining insight into these effects is important since Germany and the Netherlands are one of the largest economically interdependent partnerships. One hundred and fifty-six German professionals rated letters with errors and letters without errors…

Purpose: This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object "welcher" ("which")-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also…

Language-specific differences in number words influence number processing even in nonverbal numerical tasks. For instance, the unit-decade compatibility effect in two-digit number magnitude comparison (compatible number pairs [42_57: 4 < 5 and 2 < 7] are responded to faster than incompatible pairs [47_62: 4 < 6 but 7 > 2]) was shown to…

This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participants in the telematic simulation IDEELS (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation). The synchronous and asynchronous communication analysed was part of the MiLC Corpus, a multilingual learner corpus of texts written by…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

Existing studies on plural acquisition in German have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. Here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of German plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3- to 5-year-old monolingual…

Quantity recognition in whole number representations is a fundamental skill children need to acquire in their mathematical development. Despite the observed correlation to mathematics achievement, however, the ability to recognize quantities in structured whole number representations has not been studied extensively. In this article, we…